was easy enough for me to write a passable ring of rhymes that should
introduce with all due form and honor the names of those ladies that all
in that time agreed to be most eminent for their beauty and gentleness
in the beautiful and gentle city. And so I got a good way upon my work
with very little trouble indeed, for, as I have said, rhymes always came
easy to me and I loved to juggle with colored words. My difficulty came
with the moment when I had to decide upon the introduction of my own
heart's desire.

Now about this time of the year when I began my ballad, I was myself
very plenteously and merrily in love with a certain lady whose name I
will here set down as Ippolita, for that was what I called her, seeing
in her a kind of amazonian carriage, though that was not the name she
was known by among the men and the women, her neighbors. She had dark
eyes whose brightness seemed to widen and deepen as you kissed her
lips--and, indeed, the child loved to be kissed exceedingly, for all her
quaint air of woman-warrior--and she had dark hair that when you, being
permitted to play her lover, uncoiled it, rolled down like a great mane
to her haunches, and her face, both by its paleness and by the
perfection of its featuring, seemed to vie with those images of Greece
by which the wise set such store. To judge by the serenity of her
expression, the suavity of her glances, you would have sworn by all the
saints that here if ever was an angel, one that would carry the calm of
Diana into every action of life, and challenge passion with a chastity
that was never to be gainsaid. But he that ever held her in his arms
found that the so-seeming ice was fire, under those snows lava bubbled,
and she that might have passed for a priestess of Astarte quivered with
frenzy under the dominion of Eros. To speak only for myself, I found her
a very phoenix of sweethearts.

She was married to a tedious old Mumpsiman that kept himself and her in
little ease by plying the trade of a horse-leech, which trade, for the
girl's felicity, held him much abroad, and gave her occasion, seldom by
her neglected, to prove to her intimate of the hour that there can be
fire without smoke. Now I, being somewhat top-heavy at this season with
the wine of so fair a lady's favors, thought that I might, with no small
advantage to myself and no small satisfaction to my mistress, set me to
doing her honor with some such tuneful words as the unknown singer was
blowin