“I took it for an hour in mine own bed
This morning: there the tender orphan hands
Felt at my heart, and seemed to charm from thence
The wrath I nursed against the world.”
And again:
“I felt
Thy helpless warmth about my barren breast
In the dead prime.”
Notice, too, how ubiquitous the babe is. Ida carries it with her everywhere. It is on her judgment seat, it shares in her song of triumph when the tournament is ended, and is with her on the battlefield when she is tending her wounded brothers.
The babe is indeed the heroine of the story, holding the epic along the channel of its main motive, despite every current and breeze stirred by foreign elements in its course.