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.
VIII.
THE ROMAUNT OF ST. MARY'S WYND.
I.
Of Scotland's cities, still the rarest
Is ancient Edinburgh town;
And of her ladies, still the fairest
There you see walk up and down:
Be they gay, or be they gayless,
There they beck and there they bow,
From the Castle to the Palace,
In farthingale and furbelow.
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