But when I see thee roam, with tresses unconfined, While the amorous, odorous wind Breathes low between the sunset and the moon; Or, in a shadowy saloon, On silken cushions half reclined; I watch thy grace; and in its place My heart a charmed slumber keeps,[12] While I muse upon thy face; And a languid fire creeps Thro’ my veins to all my frame, Dissolvingly and slowly: soon From thy rose-red lips MY name Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,[13] With dinning sound my ears are rife, My tremulous tongue faltereth, I lose my colour, I lose my breath, I drink the cup of a costly death, Brimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life. I die with my delight, before I hear what I would hear from thee; Yet tell my name again to me, I _would_[14] be dying evermore, So dying ever, Eleänore. [1] With the picture of Eleänore may be compared the description which Ibycus gives of Euryalus. See Bergk’s _Anthologia Lyrica_ (Ibycus), p. 396. [2] With yellow banded bees _cf_. Keats’s “yellow girted bees,” _Endymion_, i. With this may be compared Pindar’s beautiful picture of lamus, who was also fed on honey, _Olympian_, vi., 50-80. [3] 1833 and 1842. Through. [4] Till 1857. Island. [5] 1833. Meer. [6] 1842 and 1843. Though. [7] Ambrosial, the Greek sense of ἀμβρόσιος, divine. [8] 1833 to 1851. Though. [9] 1833. Did roof noonday with doubt and fear. [10] 1833. As waves that from the outer deep Roll into a quiet cove, There fall away, and lying still, Having glorious dreams in sleep, Shadow forth the banks at will. [11] _Cf_. Horace, _Odes_, iii., xxvii., 66-8: Aderat querenti Perfidum ridens Venus, et _remisso_ Filius _arcu_. [12] 1833. I gaze on thee the cloudless noon Of mortal beauty. [13] 1833. Then I faint, I swoon. The latter part of the eighth stanza is little more than an adaptation of Sappho’s famous Ode, filtered perhaps through the version of Catullus. [14] It is curious that a poet so scrupulous as Tennyson should have retained to the last the italics. The Miller’s Daughter First published in 1833. It was greatly altered when republished in 1842, and in some respects, so Fitzgerald thought, not for the better. No alterations of much importance were made in it after 1842. The characters as well as the scenery were, it seems, purely imaginary. Tennyson said that if he thought of any mill it was that of Trumpington, near Cambridge, which bears a general resemblance to the picture here given. In the first edition the poem opened with the following stanza, which the _Quarterly_ ridiculed, and which was afterwards excised. Its omission is surely not to be regretted, whatever Fitzgerald may have thought. I met in all the close green ways, While walking with my line and rod, The wealthy miller’s mealy face, Like the moon in an ivy-tod. He looked so jolly and so good— While fishing in the milldam-water, I laughed to see him as he stood, And dreamt not of the miller’s daughter.