She opens her lids; but no longer her eyes
Behold the fair youth she would woo:
Now appears the Paint-King in his natural guise;
His face, like a palette of villainous dies,
Black and white, red and yellow, and blue.
On a bright polish'd throne, of prismatical[47] spar,
Sat the mosaick fiend like a clod;
While he rear'd in his mouth a gigantick cigar
Twice as big as the light-house, though seen from afar,
On the coast of the stormy Cape Cod.
And anon, as he puff'd the vast volumes, were seen,
In horrid festoons on the wall,
Legs and arms, head and bodies, emerging between;
Like the drawing room grim of the Scotch Sawney Beane,
By the Devil dress'd out for a ball.
"Ah me!" cried the damsel, and fell at his feet,
"Must I hang on these walls to be dried?"
"Oh, no!" said the fiend, while he sprung from his seat,
"A far nobler fortune thy person shall meet;
Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
Then, seizing the maid by her dark auburn hair,
An oil-jug he plung'd her within.
Seven days, seven nights, with the shrieks of despair
Did Ellen in torment convulse the dim air,
All cover'd with oil to the chin.
On the morn of the eighth on a huge sable stone
Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid;
With a rock for his muller, he crush'd every bone;
But though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan;
For life had forsook not the maid.
Now reaching his palette with masterly care,
Each tint on the surface he spread;
The blue of her eyes, and the brown of her hair,
The pearl and the white of her forehead so fair
And her lips' and her cheeks' rosy red.
Then stamping his foot, did the monster exclaim,
"Now I brave, cruel Fairy, thy scorn!"
When lo! from a chasm unfathom'd there came
A small tiny chariot of rose-colour'd flame,
By a team of ten glowworms upborne.
Enthron'd in the midst on an emerald bright,
Fair Geraldine sat without peer;
Her robe was the gleam of the first blush of light,
And her mantle the fleece of a noon-cloud white,
And a beam of the moon was her spear.
In a voice that stole on the still charmed air,
Like the first gentle accent of Eve,
Thus spake from her chariot the Fairy so fair:
"I come at thy call ... but, oh Paint-King! beware,
Beware if again you deceive."