riest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter's
lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has
gone and the castle folk have left her alone, the lady sinks to her
knees beside the corpse. Great wrong the dead man has done to her and
hers, and perhaps God has wrought this doom of his for a sign; but well
she knows, or thinks she knows, that if life had remained with him his
love would have been security for their honour. She stoops with a sob to
kiss the dead, but before her lips touch the cold brow she sees a packet
half-hidden in the dead man's breast. It is a folded paper about which
the blood from a spear-thrust has grown clotted, and inside is a tress
of golden hair. Some pledge of her child's she thinks it, and proceeds
to undo the paper's folds, and then learns the treachery of the fallen
knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of the knowledge of her
daughter's dishonour. It is a love-missive from the sister of his foe
and murderer.

She rose upright with a long low moan,
And stared in the dead man's face new-known.
Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
'Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,--
A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.

She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
And smote the lips and left it there.
"Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
O thou dead body and damned soul!"

Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English
narrative poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely
less terrible than Juliet's vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she
has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the
evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she
reaches her father's dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the
cor