Page:Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge).djvu/72

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54

In gentle phrase, then bid me sing to you—
'Tis more like heaven to come than what has been.

MARIA.

O my dear Mother! this strange man has left me

Troubled with wilder fancies, than the moon
Breeds in the love-sick maid who gazes at it,
Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye
She gazes idly!—But that entrance, Mother!

FOSTER-MOTHER.

Can no one hear? It is a perilous tale!


MARIA.

No one.


FOSTER-MOTHER
My husband's father told it me,

Poor old Leoni!—Angels rest his soul!

He was a woodman, and could fell and saw
With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam
Which props the hanging wall of the old chapel?
Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree