Page:Keats - Poetical Works, DeWolfe, 1884.djvu/28



Whose eyelids curtain'd up their jewels dim, Endymion: yet hourly had he striven To hide the cankering venom, that had riven His fainting recollections. Now indeed His senses had swoon'd off: he did not heed The sudden silence, or the whispers low, Or the old eyes dissolving at his woe, Or anxious calls, or close of trembling palms, Or maiden's sigh, that grief itself embalms; But in the self-same fixed trance he kept, Like one who on the earth had never stept— Ay, even as dead-still as a marble man, Frozen in that old tale Arabian.
 * Who whispers him so pantingly and close?

Peona, his sweet sister: of all those, His friends, the dearest. Hushing signs she made, And breathed a sister's sorrow to persuade A yielding up, a cradling on her care. Her eloquence did breathe away the curse She led him, like some midnight spirit nurse Of happy changes in emphatic dreams, Along a path between two little streams,— Guarding his forehead, with her round elbow, From low-grown branches, and his footsteps slow From stumbling over stumps and hillocks small; Until they came to where these streamlets fall, With mingled bubblings and a gentle rush, Into a river, clear, brimful, and flush With crystal mocking of the trees and sky A little shallop, floating there hard by, Pointed its beak over the fringed bank;