ued,
Till he arrived in Arden's mighty wood.

XLVI
When within that adventurous wood has hied
For many a mile Montalban's cavalier,
Of lonely farm or lordly castle wide,
Where the rude place was roughest and most drear,
The sky disturbed he suddenly descried,
He saw the sun's dimmed visage disappear,
And spied forth issuing from a cavern hoar
A monster, which a woman's likeness wore.

XLVII
A thousand lidless eyes are in her head:
She cannot close them, nor, I think, doth sleep:
She listens with as many ears, and spread
Like hair, about her forehead serpents creep.
Forth issued into day that figure dread
From devilish darkness and the caverned deep.
For tail, a fierce and bigger serpent wound
About her breast, and girt the monster round.

XLVIII
What in a thousand, thousand quests had ne'er
Befal'n Rinaldo, here befel the knight;
Who, when he sees the horrid form appear,
Coming to seek him and prepared for fight,
Feels in his inmost veins such freezing fear,
As haply never fell on other wight;
Yet wonted daring counterfeits and feigns,
And with a trembling hand the faulchion strains.

XLIX
The monster so the fierce assault did make
Therein her master was well descried,
It might be said; she shook a poisonous snake,
And now on this, now on the other side,
Leapt at the knight; at her Rinaldo strake
Ever meanwhile with random blows and wide;
With forestroke, backstroke, he assails the foe;
He often smites, but never plants a blow.

L
The monster threw a serpent at his breast,
That froze his heart beneath its iron case:
Now through the vizor flung the poisonous pest,
Which crept about his collar and his face.
Dismaid, Rinaldo fled the field, and prest
With all his spurs his courser through the chase:
But not behind the hellish monster halts,
Who in a thought upon the crupper vaults.

LI
Wend where the warrior will, an-end or wide,
Ever with him is that accursed Pest:
Nor knows he how from her to be untied,
Albeit his courser plunges without rest.
Like a leaf quakes his heart within his side,
Not that the snakes in other mode molest,
But they such horror and such loathing bred,
He shrieks, he groans, and gladly would be dead.

LII
By gloomiest track and blindest path he still
Threaded the tangled forest here and there;
By thorniest valley and by roughest hill,
And wheresoever d