rance.'
Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into her cell,
his 'straying thoughts go in search of her':

How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without
thee I am o'erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and
though thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days,
that month is longer than the whole hurrying year. Prithee, let
the joys of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a
two-fold light return to us at once.

And when she comes out, he cries:

Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with
thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival....
Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the
furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once
more. To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful
sheaves together. Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears
of corn, yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness.

The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic. We
find it in the classics: for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises
Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming
makes spring everywhere:

Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes? When I
see not thee, I am ne'er satisfied. Though the heavens be bright,
though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it
hide thee from me.

The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem _On the
Downfall of Thuringia_.

'One must,' says Leo,[35] 'refer the chief excellence of the poem to
the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power
of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the
sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of
the wing to this low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only
remaining relative, Amalafried:

When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of
all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And
thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no
anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what
Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou
lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother,
brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee
seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear