And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria." . . .

She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled
gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,

"And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,

She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread o'er all her yellow hair--

Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever."

But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
there had seized her

"A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain."

She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him
and draws his head to her breast.

"Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her." . . .

But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_
shoulder bore

"The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost w