The story of Lamia (1819) is taken from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and tells of a beautiful enchantress. It is the weakest of all the longer poems, and the lapses are more numerous. The language becomes mannered and overdone:
He answered, bending to her open eyes,
Where he was mirrored small in paradise,—
“My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
While I am striving how to fill my heart
With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there,
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?”