That is the kind of thing we meet with in the wondrous forest. Are you ill at ease there, and do you wish to leave it because it is wondrous? At every bend in the alley, at every change of the light, a stanza, a word, reveals a landscape or an apparition. It is morning, the white dawn gleams faintly through the trees; bluish vapors veil the horizon, and vanish in the smiling air; the springs tremble and murmur faintly amongst the mosses, and on high the poplar leaves begin to stir and flutter like the wings of butterflies. A knight alights from his horse, a valiant knight, who has unhorsed many a Saracen, and experienced many an adventure. He unlaces his helmet, and on a sudden you perceive the cheeks of a young girl:
"Which doft, her golden lockes, that were upbound Still in a knot, unto her heeles downe traced, And like a silken veile in compasse round About her backe and all her bodie wound; Like as the shining skie in summers night, What time the dayes with scorching heat abound, Is creasted all with lines of firie light, That it prodigious seemes in common peoples sight."[365]
It is Britomart, a virgin and a heroine, like Clorinda or Marfisa,[366] but how much more ideal! The deep sentiment of nature, the sincerity of reverie, the ever-flowing fertility of inspiration, the German seriousness, reanimate in this poem classical or chivalrous conceptions, even when they are the oldest or the most trite. The train of splendors and of scenery never ends. Desolate promontories, cleft with gaping chasms; thunder-stricken and blackened masses of rocks, against which the hoarse breakers dash; palaces sparkling with gold, wherein ladies, beauteous as angels, reclining carelessly on purple cushions, listen with sweet smiles to the harmony of music played by unseen hands; lofty silent walks, where avenues of oaks spread their motionless shadows over clusters of virgin violets, and turf which never mortal foot has trod; to all these beauties of art and nature he adds the marvels of mythology, and describes them with as much of love and sincerity as a painter of the Renaissance or an ancient poet. Here approach on chariots of shell, Cymoënt and her nymphs:
"A teme of dolphins raunged in aray Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoënt; They were all taught by Triton to obay To the long raynes at her commaundëment: As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went, That their brode flaggy finnes no fome did reare, Ne bubling rowndell they behinde them sent; The rest, of other fishes drawen weare; Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did sheare."[367]