Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/244

220 Before the coming thither of the disguised maidens, the young Orlando, with his old servitor, had joined the train of the Duke, and now lived as one of them, in Arden. And in this forest-life which was so in harmony with the sweet thoughts that run to music in the brain of youth, Orlando had grown to cherish the remembrance of the sparkling eyes that had shone on him, and the tender voice that had praised him, when the chain he wore was first placed about his neck. And from dwelling constantly on them, he found he could not get those thoughts out of his head; and so, perhaps, to be rid of them, he put them on paper in rhyming lines, which he called poetry. In plain words, he began to be so much in love with Rosalind that he carved her name on the trees of the forest, and writing all sorts of sonnets and odes to her beauty, let the sheets on which they were written fly all about the wood, as if to tease the wood-nymphs and the Dryads with the knowledge that there was one more lovely than they. After a while Celia came upon this moon-struck lover, stretched at his length along the ground under a tree, talking to himself of the lady of his thoughts. She picked up, not far distant, one of the sonnets he had written on the same subject. This she took to her cousin, who looked a pretty beardless boy in her disguise of