ith a last look on the heavens, the knight rode on beneath the gate:
Stepping from his steed he bowed him, stately, to his fearful fate:
On his limbs they fastened fetters, cold! how cold! their chillness ran
Freezing through his blood, the spirit of the stern, unconquered man.

Through a gallery they led him to a dark and dismal cell.
Where they left him. Sad and solemn, heavy, awful as a knell,
Seemed the fading of their footsteps, as he heard them slowly glide
Through the long and vaulted corridor till their very echo died.

Days went by--days dark with anguish, for his conscience, like a spur,
Drove him o'er the wastes of memory which were never black before;
Weeks slid by, and months--such months! such bitter months of pungent pain,
That their very hours seemed serpents gnawing at his heart and brain.

Next they led him forth to trial: like a child he bowed and went,
With his once black hair like snow, and his stalwart form so bent,
And his beard so long and white, and his cheek so thin and wan,
Even his very keepers thought it was a ghost they gazed upon!

When before his ermined judges, stately, silent, Roland came,
Over his cheek there flashed and faded, suddenly, a flash of flame:
Like a falling star it faded: lofty and erect he turned,
With the feeling that aroused it under his iron Will inurned.

"Roland, Baron Grey!" the crier, in the ancient Latin tongue,
Which, like some old bell in tolling, through the vaulted building rung:--
Cold and stern the prisoner answered--cold and stern--devoid of fear--
Looking haughtily around him:--"Roland, Baron Grey, is here!"

Muttering the solemn charge, they bade him answer; but he stood
Cold, and calm, and motionless, as though he were nor flesh nor blood,
But, rather, all a bronzed statue of the proud, primeval time--
In his silence self-devoted--in his very guilt sublime.

Thrice they prayed him: while he listened, not a quiver on his brow,
Not the movement of a hair upon his head or beard of snow,
Not the motion of a lip, nor even the flutter of an eye,
Betokening that he even heard them--he was there alone to die.

In the distant, dreary years, so run the legends even now--
Misty legends on whose summits slumber centuries of snow--
Lofty legends round whose summits clouds have lain for solemn ages--
Legends penned with iron pens in blood by Draco-minded sages--

It was written, they should bear him to a dungeon under ground,
Far beneath the castle moat, wher