This was the complete passage, and we puzzled not a little to solve its
meaning. On dipping into the past, however, I discovered that the
inscription was intended to have read as follows:--
Ye Naiads! venerate the swain
Who joined the Dryads to your train.
The rhyme was designed to honour the poet's father, who set the forest
here; but accident must have stayed the stone-cutter's hand and left the
distich incomplete.
And now a sudden flash of red aloft above the tree-tops told that the
sun was setting. Night thickened quickly, though the lamp of a great red
snow-cloud still hung above the glen long after I had left it. Beneath,
the mass of the beech wood took on wonderful colour and the streamlet,
emerging into meadows, flashed back the last glow of the sky.