Yet soft,—nay stay—what vision have we here?
What dainty darling this—what peerless peer?
What loveliest face, that loving ranks enfold.
Like brightest diamond chased in purest gold?
Dazzled and blind, mine office I forsake,
My club, my Key, my knee, my homage take.
Bright paragon, pass on in joy and bliss;—
Beshrew the gate that opes not wide at such a sight as this!
Elizabeth received most graciously the homage of the herculean porter and then passed through the guarded tower amidst the sounds of trumpets and other instruments stationed on the tower and in various parts of the castle, and dismounted near Mortimer's Tower, which was as light as day as she walked across the long bridge built especially for her and lit with torches on either side. She had no sooner stepped upon the bridge than a new spectacle was provided, for as soon as the music gave signal that she was so far advanced, a raft on the lake, disposed as to resemble a small floating island, illuminated by a great variety of torches, and surrounded by floating pageants formed to represent sea-horses, on which sat Tritons, Nereids, and other fabulous deities of the seas and rivers, made its appearance upon the lake, and, issuing from behind a small heronry where it had been concealed, floated gently towards the farther end of the bridge. On the islet appeared a beautiful woman, clad in a watchet-coloured silken mantle, bound with a broad girdle, inscribed with characters like the phylacteries of the Hebrews. Her feet and arms were bare, but her wrists and ankles were adorned with gold bracelets of uncommon size. Amidst her long silky black hair she wore a crown or chaplet of artificial mistletoe, and bore in her hand a rod of ebony tipped with silver. Two nymphs attended on her, dressed in the same antique and mystical guise. The pageant was so well managed that the Lady of the Floating Island, having performed her voyage with much picturesque effect, landed at Mortimer's Tower with her two attendants, just as Elizabeth presented herself before that outwork. The stranger then in a well-penned speech announced herself as that famous Lady of the Lake renowned in the stories of King Arthur, who had nursed the youth of the redoubted Sir Lancelot, and whose beauty had proved too powerful both for the wisdom and the spells of the mighty Merlin. Since that period she had remained possessed of her crystal dominions, she said, despite the various men of fame and might by whom Kenilworth had been successively tenanted. The Saxons, the Danes, the Normans, the Saintlowes, the Clintons, the Montforts, the Mortimers, the Plantagenets, great though they were in arms and magnificence, had never, she said, caused her to raise her head from the waters which hid her crystal palace. But a greater than all these great names had now appeared, and she came in homage and duty to welcome the peerless Elizabeth to all sport which the castle and its environs, which lake or land, could afford! The queen received the address with great courtesy and the Lady of the Lake vanished, and Arion, who was amongst the maritime deities, appeared upon his dolphin in her place. But amidst all this pageantry Sir Walter throws a side-light on Mervyn's Tower, where we see a prisoner, a pale, attenuated, half dead, yet still lovely lady, Amy Robsart, the neglected wife of Leicester, incarcerated there while her husband is flirting with the queen in the gay rooms above. Her features are worn with agony and suspense as she looks through the narrow window of her prison on the fireworks and coloured fires outside, wondering perhaps whether these were emblems of her own miserable life, "a single spark, which is instantaneously swallowed up by the surrounding darkness—a precarious glow, which rises but for a brief space into the air, that its fall may be lower."
