Then he, fierce-smiling, swiftly, without word, His countenance harsh-writhen into hate's Gnarled hideousness, haled back her marvelous head, Back, back by all its braids of gathered hair, Till her full bosom's clamorous loveliness Stark on the moon burst bare. Low leaning then, With mocking laughter, "Yea, by God's own blood! The King, O thou adulteress!" and a blade Glanced, thin as ice, plunged hard, hard in her heart.
"_Jamque vale Soli cum diceret Ambrociotes, In Stygios fertur desiluisse lacus, Morte nihil dignum passus: sed forte Platonis Divini eximum de nece legit opus._"
Now there was wind that night, wild wind, and rain; And frantic thorns, that huddled on the wold, Seemed withered witches met in storm again To keep their Sabbath and to curse and scold, With gnarled, fantastic gestures, lame and old. Deep in a hollow, where some cabin lay, A lamplit window, like an eye of gold, Glared, winked and closed--or was't an Elfin ray, A jack-o'-lanthorn gleam, lost on a wild wood way?
Still I held onward through the ugly night; Breast-deep in thistles, all their ghostly heads Kinked close with wet; through the bedraggled plight Of brakes of bramble, tousled into shreds, And tangled wastes of briars--tumbling beds For winds to toss on.--Once, across a farm, Unsteadily, a lamp towards unseen sheds,-- Like the blurred glow of some ungainly worm,-- A watery wisp of light crawled trailing through the storm.
Then swallowing blackness of the night; and thin The shrewd rain beat me and the rough limbs whipped Of dwarfed, uneasy beeches. There within Their savage circle battered tombstones tipped Squat lengths to weeds the fighting winds had ripped And chopped to tatters. And I heard before, Rounding a headland, where the gaunt trees dripped,-- A shout borne deathward from night's ghastly shore,-- Hoarse as a thousand throats the river's sullen roar.
Shuddering I stopped, for, with my feet so caked With clay, damp-dragging, safer were the graves, Crowding that vista of the wood,--which raked My face with burrs,--than, walking towards the waves, To feel earth slip away; the architraves Of darkness plunge me downward to some pit Of wallow and of water.--Madder knaves Than I have stood thus in a fever-fit Of heart and brain and shuddered from the brink of it.