[Illustration: THREE WEEKS WE WESTWARD BORE] "There lived we many years; Time dried the maiden's tears; She had forgot her fears, She was a mother; Death closed her mild blue eyes, Under that tower she lies; Ne'er shall the sun arise On such another! "Still grew my bosom then, Still as a stagnant fen!

Her ladyship looked out across the dreary fen and exclaimed, "I'll be damned, they have set us out like ducks!"

They (a) darksome land Ward (inhabit), wolf cliffs, windy nesses, Frightful fen paths where mountain stream Under nesses' mists nether (downward) wanders, A flood under earth.

am I so frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only coldsay dear again" But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, And he a half-conscious wraith.

He looked toward the east across the plain That stretched afar o'er brake and marshy fen, And clustering trees that marked the Tigris' course; And now beyond the plain o'er fields and moors, The mountain range of Zu o'er Susa's land.

It is rich, too, in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands.

He needs something which everyone knows about, something which indisputably, and admittedly, has been a human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of Beowulf a figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real; what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which lives in pestilent fens?

But how cold and gaudy, in spite of individual beauties, is that poem by the side of either of the Marianas, and especially of the one in which the scenery is drawn, simply and faithfully, from those counties which the world considers the quintessence of the prosaicthe English fens.

The weariness, the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike within and without, in the slow monotonous pace of the metre and the words, as well as in the boundless fen, and the heart of her who, "without hope of change, in sleep did seem to walk forlorn.

It was absurd that, with so wild and beautiful a world around him, he should be called upon to live in a washy fen because his father and grandfather had been unfortunate enough to do so.