LXXVII.

“It was a wild and melancholy glen,
Made gloomy by tall firs and cypress dark,
Whose roots, like any bones of buried men,
Push’d through the rotten sod for fear’s remark;
A hundred horrid stems, jagged and stark,
Wrestled with crooked arms in hideous fray,
Besides sleek ashes with their dappled bark,
Like crafty serpents climbing for a prey,
With many blasted oaks moss-grown and gray.”

LXXVIII.

“But here upon his final desperate clause
Suddenly I pronounced so sweet a strain,
Like a pang’d nightingale, it made him pause,
Till half the frenzy of his grief was slain,
The sad remainder oozing from his brain
In timely ecstasies of healing tears,
Which through his ardent eyes began to drain;—­
Meanwhile the deadly Fates unclosed their shears:—­
So pity me and all my fated peers!”

LXXIX.

Thus Ariel ended, and was some time hush’d: 
When with the hoary shape a fresh tongue pleads,
And red as rose the gentle Fairy blush’d
To read the records of her own good deeds:—­
“It chanced,” quoth she, “in seeking through the meads
For honied cowslips, sweetest in the morn,
Whilst yet the buds were hung with dewy beads.” 
And Echo answered to the huntsman’s horn,
We found a babe left in the swaths forlorn.

LXXX.

“A little, sorrowful, deserted thing,
Begot of love, and yet no love begetting;
Guiltless of shame, and yet for shame to wring;
And too soon banish’d from a mother’s petting,
To churlish nurture and the wide world’s fretting,
For alien pity and unnatural care;—­
Alas! to see how the cold dew kept wetting
His childish coats, and dabbled all his hair,
Like gossamers across his forehead fair.”

LXXXI.

“His pretty pouting mouth, witless of speech,
Lay half-way open like a rose-lipp’d shell;
And his young cheek was softer than a peach,
Whereon his tears, for roundness, could not dwell,
But quickly roll’d themselves to pearls, and fell,
Some on the grass, and some against his hand,
Or haply wander’d to the dimpled well,
Which love beside his mouth had sweetly plann’d,
Yet not for tears, but mirth and smilings bland.”

LXXXII.

“Pity it was to see those frequent tears
Falling regardless from his friendless eyes;
There was such beauty in those twin blue spheres,
As any mother’s heart might leap to prize;
Blue were they, like the zenith of the skies
Softened betwixt two clouds, both clear and mild;—­
Just touched with thought, and yet not over wise,
They show’d the gentle spirit of a child,
Not yet by care or any craft defiled.”