PART III

Tis sung in ancient minstrelsy That Phoebus wont to wear The leaves of any pleasant tree Around his golden hair;[660] Till Daphne, desperate with pursuit 5 Of his imperious love, At her own prayer transformed, took root, A laurel in the grove.

Then did the Penitent adorn His brow with laurel green; 10 And 'mid his bright locks never shorn No meaner leaf was seen; And poets sage, through every age, About their temples wound The bay; and conquerors thanked the Gods, 15 With laurel chaplets crowned.

Into the mists of fabling Time So far runs back the praise Of Beauty, that disdains to climb Along forbidden ways; 20 That scorns temptation; power defies Where mutual love is not; And to the tomb for rescue flies When life would be a blot.

To this fair Votaress, a fate 25 More mild doth Heaven ordain Upon her Island desolate; And words, not breathed in vain, Might tell what intercourse she found, Her silence to endear; 30 What birds she tamed, what flowers the ground Sent forth her peace to cheer.

To one mute Presence, above all, Her soothed affections clung, A picture on the cabin wall 35 By Russian usage hung-- The Mother-maid,[661] whose countenance bright With love abridged the day; And, communed with by taper light, Chased spectral fears away. 40

And oft, as either Guardian came, The joy in that retreat Might any common friendship shame, So high their hearts would beat; And to the lone Recluse, whate'er 45 They brought, each visiting Was like the crowding of the year With a new burst of spring.

But, when she of her Parents thought, The pang was hard to bear; 50 And, if with all things not enwrought, That trouble still is near. Before her flight she had not dared Their constancy to prove, Too much the heroic Daughter feared 55 The weakness of their love.

Dark is the past to them, and dark The future still must be, Till pitying Saints conduct her bark Into a safer sea-- 60 Or gentle Nature close her eyes, And set her Spirit free From the altar of this sacrifice, In vestal purity.

Yet, when above the forest-glooms 65 The white swans southward passed, High as the pitch of their swift plumes Her fancy rode the blast; And bore her toward the fields of France, Her Father's native land, 70 To mingle in the rustic dance, The happiest of the band!

Of those belovèd fields she oft Had heard her Father tell In phrase that now with echoes soft 75 Haunted her lonely cell; She saw the hereditary bowers, She heard the ancestral stream; The Kremlin[662] and its haughty towers Forgotten like a dream! 80