wers or held high council in their halls
What this portended, this o'erweening mass
Reared up so high no man stretching could pass
His hand over the crupper, of such girth
Of haunch, to span the pair no man on earth
Could compass with both arms. But most their eyes
Were for the riders who in godlike guise
Went naked into battle, as Gods use,
Untrammel'd by our shifts of shields and shoes,
As if we dread the earth whereof we are.
Sons of God, these: for bore not each a star
Ablaze upon his forelock? Lo, they say,
Kastor and Polydeukes, who but they,
Come in to save their sister at the last,
And war for Troy, and root King Priam fast
In his demesne, him and his heirs for ever!
Now call they soothsayers to make endeavour
With engines of their craft to read the thing;
But others urge them hale it to the King--
"Let him dispose," they say, "of it and us,
And order as he will, from Pergamos
To heave it o'er the sheer and bring to wreck;
Or burn with fire; or harbour to bedeck
The temple of some God: of three ways one.
Here it cannot abide to flout the sun
With arrogant flash for every beam of his."
Herewith agreed the men of mysteries,
Raking the bloodsick earth to have the truth,
And getting what they lookt for, as in sooth
A man will do. So then they all fell to't
To hale with cords and lever foot by foot
The portent; and as frenzy frenzy breeds,
And what one has another thinks he needs,
So to a straining twenty other score
Lent hands, and ever from the concourse more
Of them, who hauled as if Troy's life depended
On hastening forward that wherein it ended.
So came the Horse to Troy, so was filled up
With retribution that sweet loving-cup
Paris had drunk to Helen overseas--
The cup which whoso drains must taste the lees.

EIGHTH STAVE

THE HORSE IN TROY; THE PASSION OF KASSANDRA

High over Troy the windy citadel,
Pergamos, towereth, where is the cell
And precinct of Athene. There, till reived,
They kept the Pallium, sacred and still grieved
By all who held the city consecrate
To Her, as first it was, till she learned hate
For what had once been lovely, and let in
The golden Aphrodite, and sweet sin
To ensnare Prince Paris and send him awooing
A too-fair wife, to be his own undoing
And Troy's and a