t long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young.

The other is a song, more than a song, in _Pippa Passes_, a true piece
of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to
Eastern and mediaeval elements, in its roving imaginations. It is
admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and
still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of
the Golden Age. I quote a great part of it:

A King lived long ago,
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now:
And the King's locks curled,
Disparting o'er a forehead full
As the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn
Of some sacrificial bull--
Only calm as a babe new-born:
For he was got to a sleepy mood,
So safe from all decrepitude,
Age with its bane, so sure gone by,
(The gods so loved him while he dreamed)
That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the King should ever die.

LUIGI. No need that sort of King should ever die!

Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
He sat to see his people pass,
And judge them every one
From its threshold of smooth stone
They haled him many a valley-thief
Caught in the sheep-pens, robber chief
Swarthy and shameless, beggar, cheat,
Spy-prowler, or rough pirate found
On the sea-sand left aground;

* * *

These, all and every one,
The King judged, sitting in the sun.

LUIGI. That King should still judge sitting in the sun!

His councillors, on left and right,
Looked anxious up,--but no surprise
Disturbed the King's old smiling eyes
Where the very blue had turned to white.
'Tis said, a Python scared one day
The breathless city, till he came,
With forty tongue and eyes on flame,
Where the old King sat to judge alway;
But when he saw the sweepy hair
Girt with a crown of berries rare
Which the god will hardly give to wear
To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare
In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights,
At his wondrous forest rites,--
Seeing this, he did not dare
Approach the threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there.
Such grace had kings when the world begun!

Then there are two other romantic pieces,