She turn'd and beheld on each shoulder a wing "Oh! heaven!" cried she, "who art thou?" From the roof to the ground did his fierce answer ring, When frowning, he thunder'd, "I am the Paint-King! And mine, lovely maid, thou art now!" Then high from the ground did the grim monster lift The loud-screaming maid, like a blast; And he sped through the air, like a meteor swift, While the clouds, wand'ring by him, did fearfully drift To the right and the left as he pass'd. Now, suddenly sloping his hurricane flight, With an eddying whirl he descends; The air all below him becomes black as night, And the ground where he treads, as if mov'd with affright, Like the surge of the Caspian bends. "I am here!" said the fiend, and he thundering knock'd At the gates of a mountainous cave: The gates open'd wide, as by magick unlock'd, While the peaks of the mount, reeling to and fro, rock'd, Like an island of ice on the wave. "Oh! mercy!" cried Ellen, and swoon'd in his arms. But the Paint-King, he scoff'd at her pain. "Prithee, love," said the monster, "what mean these alarms?" She hears not, she sees not the terrible charms That wake her to horror again. She opens her lids; but no longer her eyes Behold the fair youth she would woo: Now appears the Paint-King in his natural guise; His face, like a palette of villainous dies, Black and white, red and yellow, and blue. On a bright polish'd throne, of prismatical[47] spar, Sat the mosaick fiend like a clod; While he rear'd in his mouth a gigantick cigar Twice as big as the light-house, though seen from afar, On the coast of the stormy Cape Cod. And anon, as he puff'd the vast volumes, were seen, In horrid festoons on the wall, Legs and arms, head and bodies, emerging between; Like the drawing room grim of the Scotch Sawney Beane, By the Devil dress'd out for a ball. "Ah me!" cried the damsel, and fell at his feet, "Must I hang on these walls to be dried?" "Oh, no!" said the fiend, while he sprung from his seat, "A far nobler fortune thy person shall meet; Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!" Then, seizing the maid by her dark auburn hair, An oil-jug he plung'd her within. Seven days, seven nights, with the shrieks of despair Did Ellen in torment convulse the dim air, All cover'd with oil to the chin. On the morn of the eighth on a huge sable stone Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid; With a rock for his muller, he crush'd every bone; But though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan; For life had forsook not the maid.