She linger’d, looking like a summer moon Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head, And shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee; Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid From pillar unto pillar, until she reach’d The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt In purple blazon’d with armorial gold. Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity: The deep air listen’d round her as she rode, And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear. The little wide-mouth’d heads upon the spout Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur Made her cheek flame: her palfrey’s footfall shot Light horrors thro’ her pulses: the blind walls Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she Not less thro’ all bore up, till, last, she saw The white-flower’d elder-thicket from the field Gleam thro’ the Gothic archways[3] in the wall. Then she rode back cloth’d on with chastity: And one low churl,[4] compact of thankless earth, The fatal byword of all years to come, Boring a little auger-hole in fear, Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will, Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head, And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait On noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misused; And she, that knew not, pass’d: and all at once, With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon Was clash’d and hammer’d from a hundred towers,[5] One after one: but even then she gain’d Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crown’d, To meet her lord, she took the tax away, And built herself an everlasting name. [1] These four lines are not in the privately printed volume of 1842, but were added afterwards. [2] St. Michael’s, Trinity, and St. John. [3] 1844. Archway. [4] His effigy is still to be seen, protruded from an upper window in High Street, Coventry. [5] A most poetical licence. Thirty-two towers are the very utmost allowed by writers on ancient Coventry. The Two Voices First published in 1842, though begun as early as 1833 and in course of composition in 1834. See Spedding’s letter dated 19th September, 1834. Its original title was _The Thoughts of a Suicide_. No alterations were made in the poem after 1842.