Woe was it when Sir William's hall Received the mournful train: No more her voice with sweetest call His morns to wake again! No more her merry step to cheer The days when clouds were wild! No more her form on palfrey near When sport his noons beguiled! Worse woe when Furness monks with dole-- While gentle hands conveyed Her body--for a parted soul The solemn ritual said; And laid her where the waving leaves Breathed low amidst the calm, When loud upon the fading eves Rolled organ-chant and psalm. With Urswick's hand in fondest grasp Said Fleming--"Vainly rise My days for me: my heart must clasp Her image, or it dies! Through mass and prayer I hear her voice; I know the fiends have power-- That chant and dole and choral noise Can purge not--o'er that flower!" They wandered where Engaddi's palms And Sharon's roses wave; Where Hebrew virgins chant their psalms By many a mountain cave: Mid rock-hewn chambers by the Nile, Where Magian fathers lay;-- The secret of the spell-struck pile To drag to realms of day. In vain! His gallant heart sleeps well, Beneath the Lybian air; And still the enchantment holds the dell, And her so sweet and fair. Still on yon loop hole stretched by night, The tyrant-moth is laid: While circling in their ceaseless flight The ages rise and fade. There sometimes as in nights of yore, Heard faint and sweet, a sound Peals from yon tower, while o'er and o'e The vale repeats it round. And down the glen the muffled tone Floats slowly, long upborne; Answered as if far off were blown A warrior's bugle-horn. Yet one day, with unconscious art, May some rude hand unfold Great Wodin's breast, and rend apart The fragment from its hold. Then, while the deadly nightshade's veins In bitter streams shall pour Their juices, his usurped domains Shall own the Moth no more. Then him a milk white swallow's power Shall timely overthrow. And fair, as from a beauteous bower, In raiment like the snow, The Flower of Aldingham--the child Of old Sir William's days-- Shall break the bondage round her piled; But not to meet his gaze. Nor forth beneath the dewy dawn, All radiant like the morn, Shall Urswick's Knight lead up the lawn Beside the scented thorn, His bride into the blighted halls Whence once she wildly strayed In ages past, by Furness walls, And with the Bekan played. The sea-snake through the chambers roves Of old Sir William's home-- Fair Aldingham, its bowers, and groves, And fields she loved to roam: And where the gallant Urswick graced His own ancestral board, Now ferns and wild weeds crowd the waste, The creeping fox is lord.