The green depths
were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all
the summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these
heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust
their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago
forgot her now and knew her no longer.
Feeling her desolation, wild, melancholy, forsaken songs rose thereon
from that frightful aerie,--weeping, wailing tunes, that sob among the
people from age to age, and overflow with otherwise unexpressed
sadness,--all rude, mournful ballads,--old tearful strains, that
Shakspeare heard the vagrants sing, and that rise and fall like the
wind and tide,--sailor-songs, to be heard only in lone mid-watches
beneath the moon and stars,--ghastly rhyming romances, such as that
famous one of the "Lady Margaret," when
"She slipped on her gown of green
A piece below the knee,--
And 'twas all a long, cold winter's night
A dead corse followed she."
Still the beast lay with closed eyes, yet never relaxing his grasp.
Once a half-whine of enjoyment escaped him,--he fawned his fearful head
upon her; once he scored her cheek with his tongue: savage caresses
that hurt like wounds. How weary she was! and yet how terribly awake!
How fuller and fuller of dismay grew the knowledge that she was only
prolonging her anguish and playing with death! How appalling the
thought that with her voice ceased her existence! Yet she could not
sing forever; her throat was dry and hard; her very breath was a pain;
her mouth was hotter than any desert-worn pilgrim's;--if she could but
drop upon her burning tongue one atom of the ice that glittered about
her!--but both of her arms were pinioned in the giant's vice.
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