him; his thoughts and his passions kept throbbing time with the beat of the hoof, with the sweep of the gallop.
So long ago loved his namesake the Rhymer, when under the tree of Erceldoune—the Tree of Grammarye—the sorceress-lips touched his, and the eyes brighter than mortal brightness looked into his own; lips that wooed him across the dark Border, eyes that dared him to brave the Lake of Fire for her sake. Those old» old legends!—how they repeat themselves in every age, in every life.
With the dawn he came upon a pool, lying landlocked, far and solitary, encircled with cedars and cypress and superb drooping boughs, now heavy with the white blossoms of the sweet chesnut, and while his horse drank at the brink, he threw himself in to bathe, dipping down into the clear brown waters, and striking out into the depths of green blossoming shade, while the swell of a torrent that poured into it lashed him with its foam, cold even in the east before sunrise, and hurled the mass of water against his limbs, firm-knit, sinewy, colossal as the polished limbs of a Roman bronze of Milo. As he shook the drenching spray from his hair, and swam against the current, looking upward at the
