VI.

Alace! and alace! for that false pride
In the hearts of those of high degree,
And that gentle love should be decried
By its noblest champion, Chivalrie. 
If the baron shall hear a whispered word
Of that fond lover’s sweet minstrelsie,
That love-lorn heart and his angry sword
May some night better acquainted be. 
Woe! woe! to the viper’s envenomed tongue
That obeys the hest of a coward’s heart,
Who tries to avenge his fancied wrong
By getting another to act his part. 
Sir Hubert has lisped in the baron’s ear,
When drinking wine at the evening hour,
That a minstrel clown met his daughter dear
At night in her lonely greenwood bower. 
“Hush! hush!  Sir Hubert, thy words are fires;
Elves are about us that hear and see,
Who may tell to the ghost of my noble sires
Of a damned blot on our pedigree.” 
And the baron frowned with darkened brow,
And by the bones of his fathers swore
That from that night this minstrel theou,
To his daughter would warble his love no more.

VII.

That night the minstrel sang in softer flow,
Waxing and waning soft and softer still,
Like autumn’s night winds breathing loun and low,
Or evening murmur of the wimpling rill;
But there was heard that night no farewell strain,
As in foretime there ever used to be—­
A stop! and then no more was heard again
That bashful lover’s hapless minstrelsie. 
Next morn the maid, with purpose to enjoy
The forest flowers and wild birds’ early song,
Unto the greenwood went; and to employ
Her weary musing as she went along,
Love’s magic memory from its depths upbrought
The notes that ever still so sweetly hung
About her heart; and as she gaily thought,
She sung them o’er as she had heard them sung. 
Onward she moved:  her dreamy, listless eye
Had leant upon a fragrant wild-rose bed,
And, glancing farther, what does she descry? 
Stretched stiff and bloody, his sad spirit fled,
Yea, him whom when asleep she once had seen,
And had so often wished again to see,
Now dead and cold ’mong the leaves so green,
And all beneath the well-known greenwood tree.

“Good day, my ladye,” then some one said—­
It was Sir Hubert there close behind;
“He will sing no more, or I am belied,
For the reason, I wot, that he wanteth wind.” 
Up came the baron in angry vein;
He casts his eye on the body there;
He scans the features again and again
With a look of doubt and shudder of fear;
His hands he wrings with a groan of pain,
He rolls his eyeballs with gesture wild—­
“Great God! by a villain’s counsel I’ve slain
The youth who saved my darling child!”

Among yon hoary elms that o’er him grow
A harp is hung to catch the evening gale,
That sings to him in accents soft and low,
And soothes the maiden with its sorrowful wail,
Who, as she sits within her greenwood bower,
And listens to the teylin’s solemn strain,
Bethinks her, in her tears, of every hour
That gentle youth had sung to her in vain.