contributed to the harmony and the sweetness. The
notes of the turtle-dove were deeper here than any where else; the hard
oak, and the chaste laurel, and the whole exuberant family of trees,
the earth, the water, every element of creation, seemed to have been
compounded but for one object, and to breathe forth the fulness of its
bliss.[10]

The two messengers, hardening their souls with all their might against
the enchanting impression, moved forward silently among the trees; till,
looking through the branches into a little opening which formed a bower,
they saw--or did they but think they saw?--no, they saw indeed the hero
and his Armida reclining on the grass.[11] Her dress was careless,
her hair loose in the summer-wind. His head lay in her bosom; a smile
trembled on her lips and in her eyes, like a sunbeam in water; and as she
thus looked on him with passionate love, he looked up at her, face to
face, and returned it with all his soul.

Now she kissed his lips, now his eyes; and then they looked again at one
another with their ever-hungry looks; and then she kissed him again, and
he gave a sigh so deep you would have thought his soul had gone out of
him, and passed into hers. The two warriors from their covert gazed on
the loving scene.

At the lover's side there hung a strange accoutrement for a warrior,
namely, a crystal mirror. He rose a little on his elbow, and gave it into
Armida's hands: and in two different objects each beheld but one emotion,
she hers in the glass, and he his own in her eyes. But he would not
suffer her to look long at any thing but himself; and then they spake
loving and adoring words; and after a while Armida bound up her hair, and
put some flowers into it, as jewels might be put upon gold, and added a
rose or two to the lilies of her bosom, and adjusted her veil. And never
did peacock look so proudly beautiful when he displays the pomp of his
eyed plumes; nor was ever the rainbow so sweetly coloured when it curves
forth its dewy bosom against the light.[12] But lovely above all was the
effect of a magic girdle which the enchantress had made with her whole
art, and which she never laid aside day or night. Spirit in it had taken
substance; the subtlest emotions of the soul a shape and palpability.
Tender disdains were in it, and repulses that attracted, and levities
that endeared, and contentments full of joy, and smiles, and little
words, and drops of delicious tears, and short-coming s