The strength of her step was the heart that burn’d;

And the Bramin groves in the starlight smiled,

As the mother pass’d with her slaughter’d child.

III.

Hark! a wild sound of the desert’s horn

Through the woods round the Indian city borne,

A peal of the cymbal and tambour afar—

War! ’tis the gathering of Moslem war!

The Bramin look’d from the leaguer’d towers—

He saw the wild archer amidst his bowers;