XXX. Fair-seemly pleasance each to other makes, A garland for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough; out of whose rift there came* Small drops of gory blood, that trickled down the same. * See the Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto xiii., st. 41. "Pur tragge al fin la spada, e con gran forza "Che poi distinto in voce: Ahi troppo (disse), &c. He drew his blade at length, and with a bound Then words distinctly uttered; "Ah forbear!" XXXI. Therewith a piteous yelling voice was heard, O too dear love, love bought with death too dear !" And with that sudden horror could no member move. XXXII. At last whenas the dreadf passion Was overpast, and manhood well awake; And doubting much his sense, he thus bespake: XXXIII. Then, groaning deep; "Nor damned ghost," quoth he, "Nor guileful sprite, to thee these words doth speak; But once a man Fradubio, now a tree; Wretched man, wretched tree! whose nature weak 66 XXXIV. 'Say on, Fradubio, then, or man or tree," As raging flames who striveth to suppress." This many errant knights hath brought to wretchedness. XXXV. "In prime of youthly years, when courage hot The fire of love and joy of chivalry First kindled in my breast, it was my lot We omit some stanzas of Fradubio's story as rather of an unpleasing strain; his yielding so implicitly to the deceptions of Duessa, and showing so little passion at the recollection of the sad fate of his mistress "turn'd to treen mould"-i. e. transformed into a tree-by the false witch's arts, create a sort of disgust with his character. Indeed we can hardly help suspecting our own "good knight" to be rather a dull fellow, too; for it is leze majesté against all-potent Love, to suppose that a vile Show like Duessa could for a moment deceive eyes that had once owned his power, unless the lover lacked some of the true ele ments. Fradubio finishes his sad story with the account of his own enclosure in the tree, and then the Red Cross Knight asks the duration of the spell :— XLIII. "But how long time," said then the elfin knight, That is the term prescribed by the spell." "O how," said he, "might I that well out find, "Time and suffised fates to former kind Shall us restore; none else from hence may us unbind." XLIV. The false Duessa, now Fidessa hight, Heard how in vain Fradubio did lament, And knew well all was true. But the good knight, Full of sad fear and ghastly dreariment, When all this speech the living tree had spent, And with fresh clay did close the wooden wound : XLV. Her seeming dead he found with feigned fear, And dimmed sight with pale and deadly hue, He set her on her steed, and forward forth did bear. The exquisite description with which the next Canto opens, is not perhaps surpassed in the language. Una's unprotected and sad, but not timorous state-her beauty-her calmness-her heroic courage and pity at sight of the lion, and the immediate and natural reference to her lost love-overpower even the exquisite picturesqueness of the scene, and give us a picture that can never be painted, save by the imagination and the heart. |