There was one surpassing fair:
Light her heart and light her footstep,
Blue her eyes and gold her hair.
Then her pure and gentle spirit
Shone abroad like smiles from heaven.—
Ah, such divine gifts of beauty
Seldom are to mortals given.
The first one had now finished two pages; the second, three. How much more they would weave I neither knew nor thought. I was too much fascinated by the weirdness and reality of it all to think of anything but the two stories that were being thus wonderfully—thus psychologically though not supernaturally—revealed to me in beauty by ugly spiders that wrought together; each, I knew, unconscious of the other. This fact of each being unconscious of the words, thoughts, and music of the other, and the fact that the web of one was woven into characters to represent my handwriting, while that of the other was the illuminated work of my old chum, gave the two songs an interest that no one else can even approach. No, not even if the same situation should present itself to him, and the spiders should be actually before him, as their work, robbed of all these fascinating features, now is.
Both now wove more and more rapidly, and it was only when the first had woven the following whole page of manuscript that I turned to the other.—
Oft when twilight slowly crept