human being, under a more bounded
shape."

As he still faltered, and was slow to believe her words, she added the
following song:

"Youth, fear not the converse of my bed. I change my bodily outline in
twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews. For I
conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my
own sweet will: now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty
Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants
again on earth that head which was near the firmament. Thus I lightly
shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for
changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of
my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops.
Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I
have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows
of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and
my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs,
at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members
and now rolling them back into a coil. I dart out my ingathered limbs,
and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing
my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the
greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the
embraces of men."

By thus averring she obtained the embraces of Hadding; and her love for
the youth burned so high that when she found him desirous of revisiting
his own land, she did not hesitate to follow him in man's attire, and
counted it as joy to share his hardships and perils. While upon the
journey she had undertaken, she chanced to enter in his company, in
order to pass the night, a dwelling, the funeral of whose dead master
was being conducted with melancholy rites. Here, desiring to pry into
the purposes of heaven by the help of a magical espial, she graved on
wood some very dreadful spells, and caused Hadding to put them under the
dead man's tongue; thus forcing him to utter, with the voice so given, a
strain terrible to hear:

"Perish accursed he who hath dragged me back from those below, let him
be punished for calling a spirit out of bale!

"Whoso hath called me, who am lifeless and dead, back from the abode
below, and hath brought me again into upper air, let him pay full
penalty with his own death in the dreary shades beneath l