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Ranolf and Amohia

IV

IV

Again her journey she pursues.
Her thoughts come back to their accustomed train:
"Only to save him—only make him know,
Although her joy—her life—her love she lose—
No other Maid could love him so!"—
Still fell the sad, slow, melancholy rain;
And though the white mist hid sky, mountain, plain,
Yet somehow seemed it, on her weary brain
The sunshine of that awful morn
When Ranolf last she saw and left—
Still lay—a solemn sombre light forlorn;—
Ever she seemed to wander woebegone
Through endless mazes of a forest lone
All stripped and bare, of every leaf bereft;
While far above her, through the treetops high
That, leafless, yet shut out the sky,
A loud monotonous wind for ever roared,
And those strange, dreary, sombre sunbeams poured;
While in the foreground only could be seen
The lover and the love-joy that had been!
And every actual outward sight and sound,
Men, women, places, voices all around,
page 445 Came faintly breaking through this muffling screen,
This sad bright curtain that would intervene;
And only for a moment, face or speech
Importunate of others, could emerge
Through that drear desolate light and murmur loud,
As through an ever-circling shroud—
And her preoccupied perception reach
And on her absent mind their presence urge.

On—on! for days as by a dream oppressed—
Still on—by one idea absorbed—possessed!—
Directly in her way
A broad and swollen river lay:
Her road led through the shallows by its bank,
Where yellow waters eddying swirled
Through flax-tufts waving green and tall and rank;
But in the midst the raging torrent hurled
Its waters swift, direct, and deep,
Where often some uprooted tree would sweep—
A great black trunk unwieldy—hastening down
The flood surcharged with clayey silt;
And dip and heave and plunge and tilt
Half buried in the wavelets brown.
She paused—but something in her breast
Still urged her on:—she could not rest:
And then those friends whom Kangapo addrest—
Might they not still her course arrest?
What if they still should be upon her track—
Would they not meet her if she ventured back?—
She tore her mantle off in haste,
And rolled it up, and tightly tied
With flax, and slung it round her waist;
page 446 Then wading, struggled through the high sword-grass
And streambowed tortured blades—a tangled mass,
And struck into the torrent fierce and wide!

Alas! no strength of limb or will,
No stoutest heart, no swimmer's skill
Could long withstand the headlong weight and force
Of that wild tide in its tumultuous course!—
Soon was she swept away—whirled o'er and o'er—
And hurried out of conscious life
Almost without a sense of pain or strife.