On the skull of a Titan, that Heaven defied,
  Sat the fiend, like the grito Giant Gog,
While aloft to his mouth a huge pipe he applied,
Twice as big as the Eddystone Lighthouse, descried
  As it looms through an easterly fog.

And anon, as he puff’d the vast volumes, were seen,
  In horrid festoons on the wall,
Legs and arms, heads and bodies emerging between,
Like the drawing-room grim of the Scotch Sawney Beane,
  By the Devil dress’d out for a ball.

“Ah me!” cried the Damsel, and fell at his feet. 
  “Must I hang on these walls to be dried?”
“Oh, no!” said the fiend, while he sprung from his seat,
“A far nobler fortune thy person shall meet;
  Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!”

Then, seizing the maid by her dark auburn hair,
  An oil jug he plung’d her within. 
Seven days seven nights, with the shrieks of despair,
Did Ellen in torment convulse the dun air,
  All covered with oil to the chin.

On the morn of the eighth on a huge sable stone
  Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid;
With a rock for his muller he crush’d every bone,
But, though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan;
  For life had forsook not the maid.

Now reaching his palette, with masterly care
  Each tint on its surface he spread;
The blue of her eyes, and the brown of her hair,
And the pearl and the white of her forehead so fair,
  And her lips’ and her cheeks’ rosy red.

Then, stamping his foot, did the monster exclaim,
  “Now I brave, cruel Fairy, thy scorn!”
When lo! from a chasm wide-yawning there came
A light tiny chariot of rose-colour’d flame,
  By a team of ten glow-worms upborne.

Enthroned In the midst on an emerald bright,
  Fair Geraldine sat without peer;
Her robe was a gleam of the first blush of light,
And her mantle the fleece of a noon-cloud white,
  And a beam of the moon was her spear.

In an accent that stole on the still charmed air
  Like the first gentle language of Eve,
Thus spake from her chariot the Fairy so fair: 
“I come at thy call, but, oh Paint-King, beware. 
  Beware if again you deceive.”

“Tis true,” said the monster, “thou queen of my heart,
  Thy portrait I oft have essay’d;
Yet ne’er to the canvass could I with my art
The least of thy wonderful beauties impart;
  And my failure with scorn you repaid.

“Now I swear by the light of the Comet-King’s tail!”
  And he tower’d with pride as he spoke,
“If again with these magical colours I fail,
The crater of Etna shall hence be my jail,
  And my food shall be sulphur and smoke.

“But if I succeed, then, oh, fair Geraldine! 
  Thy promise with justice I claim,
And thou, queen of Fairies, shalt ever be mine,
The bride of my bed; and thy portrait divine
  Shall fill all the earth with my fame.”