Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.
We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
Yet for three days about the barriers there
The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;
But still amid the crash of falling walls,
And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
St. George's banner, and the seven swords,
And still they cried, 'St. George Guienne,' until
Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."
The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in "Geffray Teste
Noire" is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal ball,
rather than like a picture suggested by printed words. "Shameful Death"
has the same enchanted kind of presentment. We look through a "magic
casement opening on the foam" of the old waves of war. Poems of a pure
fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind" and "The
Blue Closet." Each only lives in fantasy. Motives, and facts, and
"story" are unimportant and out of view. The pictures arise distinct,
unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on
our eyes between sleeping and waking.
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