Down in a vale with pine and cypress clad, Refresh’d with gentle winds, and brown with shade, The chaste Diana’s private haunt there stood, Full in the centre of the darksome wood, A spacious grotto, all around o’ergrown With hoary moss, and arch’d with pumice-stone. From out its rocky clefts the waters flow, And trickling swell into a lake below. Nature had everywhere so play’d her part, That everywhere she seem’d to vie with art. Here the bright goddess, toil’d and chafed with heat, Was wont to bathe her in the cool retreat.

Here did she now with all her train resort, Panting with heat, and breathless from the sport; Her armour-bearer laid her bow aside, Some loosed her sandals, some her veil untied; Each busy nymph her proper part undress’d, While Crocale, more handy than the rest, Gather’d her flowing hair, and in a noose Bound it together, while her own hung loose; Five of the more ignoble sort, by turns, Fetch up the water, and unlade the urns.