"Which ev'n the Valkyrs with their bloodless hands58
Dare never draw aside,—go seek the Shield!
Yet be what follows known!—yon kneeling bands
Whose camps were Andes, and whose battle-field
Left plains, now empires, rolling seas of gore,
Shall near the clang and heap to life once more.
"Roused from their task, revengeful shall arise59
The never-baffled 'Choosers of the Slain;'
The Fiend thy hand shall wake, unclose the eyes
That flash'd on heavenly hosts their storms again,
And thy soul wither in the mighty frown
Before whose night an earlier sun sunk down.
"The rocks shall close all path for flight save one,60
Where now the Troll-fiends wait to rend their prey,
And each malign and monster skeleton,
Reclothed with life as in the giant day
When yonder seas were valleys, scent thy gore,
And grin with fangs that gnash for food once more.
"Ho, dost thou shudder, pale one? Back and live."61
Thrice strove the King for speech, and thrice in vain;
For he was man, and till our souls survive
The instincts born of flesh, shall Horror reign
In that Unknown beyond the realms of Sense,
Where the soul's darkness seems the man's defence.
Yet as when through uncertain troublous cloud62
Breaks the sweet morning star, and from its home
Smiles lofty peace, so through the phantom crowd
Of fears the Eos of the world to come,
Faith, look'd—revealing how earth-nourish'd are
The clouds, and how beyond their reach the star!
Mute on his knee, amidst the kneeling dead63
He sank—the dead the dreaming fiend revered,
And he, the living God! Then terror fled,
And all the king illumed the front he rear'd.
Firm to the couch on which the fiend reposed
He strode;—the curtains, murmuring, round him closed.
Now while this chanced, without the tortured rock64
Raged fierce the war between the rival might
Of beast and man; the dwarf king's ravenous flock
And Norway's warriors led by Cymri's knight.
For by the foot-prints through the snows explored,
On to the rock the bands had track'd their lord.
Repell'd, not conquer'd, back to crag and cave,65
Sullen and watchful still, the monsters go;
And solitude resettles on the wave,
But silence not; around, aloft, alow
Roar the couch'd beasts, and answering from the main,
Shrieks the shrill gull and booms the dismal crane.
And now the rock itself from every tomb66
Of its dead world within, sends voices forth,
Sounds direr far, than in its rayless gloom
Crash on the midnight of the farthest North.
From beasts our world hath lost, the strident yell,
The shout of giants and the laugh of hell.
Reels all the isle; and every ragged steep67
Hurls down an avalanche;—all the crater-cave
Glows into swarthy red, and fire-showers leap
From rended summits, hissing to the wave
Through its hard ice; or in huge crags, wide-sounding
Spring where they crash—on rushing and rebounding.