“Youth, fear not the converse of my bed.  I change my bodily outline in twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews.  For I conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my own sweet will:  now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants again on earth that head which was near the firmament.  Thus I lightly shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops.  Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects.  He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me.  My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold:  at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil.  I dart out my ingathered limbs, and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the embraces of men.”

By thus averring she obtained the embraces of Hadding; and her love for the youth burned so high that when she found him desirous of revisiting his own land, she did not hesitate to follow him in man’s attire, and counted it as joy to share his hardships and perils.  While upon the journey she had undertaken, she chanced to enter in his company, in order to pass the night, a dwelling, the funeral of whose dead master was being conducted with melancholy rites.  Here, desiring to pry into the purposes of heaven by the help of a magical espial, she graved on wood some very dreadful spells, and caused Hadding to put them under the dead man’s tongue; thus forcing him to utter, with the voice so given, a strain terrible to hear: 

“Perish accursed he who hath dragged me back from those below, let him be punished for calling a spirit out of bale!

“Whoso hath called me, who am lifeless and dead, back from the abode below, and hath brought me again into upper air, let him pay full penalty with his own death in the dreary shades beneath livid Styx.  Behold, counter to my will and purpose, I must declare some bitter tidings.  For as ye go away from this house ye will come to the narrow path of a grove, and will be a prey to demons all about.  Then she who hath brought our death back from out of void, and has given us a sight of this light once more, by her prayers wondrously drawing forth the ghost and casting it into the bonds of the body, shall bitterly bewail her rash enterprise.

“Perish accursed he who hath dragged me back from those below, let him be punished for calling a spirit out of bale!