’Therefore, hold on thy cherished four long notes, which are as the very edge where exultation and anguish melt, meet, and are sharpened to one ecstasy, death-dividing bird!  Fill the woods with passionate chuckle and sob, sweet chaplain of the marriage service of a soul with heaven!  Pour out thy holy wine of song upon the soft-footed darkness, till, like a priest of the inmost temple, ‘tis drunken with fair intelligences!’

Thus the old minstrels and minnesingers.

Strong and full sang the nightingales that night Farina held watch by the guilty castle that entombed his living beloved.  The castle looked itself a denser shade among the moonthrown shadows of rock and tree.  The meadow spread like a green courtyard at the castle’s foot.  It was of lush deep emerald grass, softly mixed with grey in the moon’s light, and showing like jasper.  Where the shadows fell thickest, there was yet a mist of colour.  All about ran a brook, and babbled to itself.  The spring crocus lifted its head in moist midgrasses of the meadow, rejoiced with freshness.  The rugged heights seemed to clasp this one innocent spot as their only garden-treasure; and a bank of hazels hid it from the castle with a lover’s arm.

‘The moon will tell me,’ mused Farina; ’the moon will signal me the hour!  When the moon hangs over the round tower, I shall know ’tis time to strike.’

The song of the nightingales was a full unceasing throb.

It went like the outcry of one heart from branch to branch.  The four long notes, and the short fifth which leads off to that hurried gush of music, gurgling rich with passion, came thick and constant from under the tremulous leaves.

At first Farina had been deaf to them.  His heart was in the dungeon with Margarita, or with the Goshawk in his dangers, forming a thousand desperate plans, among the red-hot ploughshares of desperate action.  Finally, without a sense of being wooed, it was won.  The tenderness of his love then mastered him.

‘God will not suffer that fair head to come to harm!’ he thought, and with the thought a load fell off his breast.

He paced the meadows, and patted the three pasturing steeds.  Involuntarily his sight grew on the moon.  She went so slowly.  She seemed not to move at all.  A little wing of vapour flew toward her; it whitened, passed, and the moon was slower than before.  Oh! were the heavens delaying their march to look on this iniquity?  Again and again he cried, ‘Patience, it is not time!’ He flung himself on the grass.  The next moment he climbed the heights, and was peering at the mass of gloom that fronted the sky.  It reared such a mailed head of menace, that his heart was seized with a quivering, as though it had been struck.  Behind lay scattered some small faint-winkling stars on sapphire fields, and a stain of yellow light was in a breach of one wall.

He descended.  What was the Goshawk doing?  Was he betrayed?  It was surely now time?  No; the moon had not yet smitten the face of the castle.  He made his way through the hazel-bank among flitting nightmoths, and glanced up to measure the moon’s distance.  As he did so, a first touch of silver fell on the hoary flint.