A PRINCE I was, blue-eyed, and fair in face,
Of temper amorous, as the first of May,
With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl,
For on my cradle shone the Northern star.

There lived an ancient legend in our house.
Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt
Because he cast no shadow, had foretold,

Dying, that none of all our blood should know
The shadow from the substance, and that one
Should come to fight with shadows and to fall.
For so, my mother said, the story ran.

And, truly, waking dreams were, more or less,
An old and strange affection of the house.

Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:
On a sudden, in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore,
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts,

1. The first speaker here begins the story.

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7. Cast no shadow. The myth of the man who cast no shadow is not uncommon in modern literature. In the present instance the sorcerer had no shadow because he had sold his soul to Satan, on the theory explained in the following passage: "To understand the popular conceptions of the human soul or spirit, it is instructive to notice the words which have been found suitable to express it. The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary is like a shadow, and thus the familiar term of the shade comes in to express the soul. . . . There are found among the lower races not only the types of those familiar classical terms, the skia or umbra, but also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless [and hence soulless] men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern readers in Chamisso's tale of Peter Schlemihl."-Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871, vol. i., p. 388. 13. Affection, disease.

14. Weird seizures. See Appendix, II., The Weird Seizures.

And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

Our great court-Galen poised his gilt-head cane,
And paw'd his beard, and mutter'd "catalepsy."
My mother pitying made a thousand prayers;
My mother was as mild as any saint,
Half-canonized by all that look'd on her,
So gracious was her tact and tenderness:
But my good father thought a king a king;
He cared not for the affection of the house;
He held his sceptre like a pedant's wand
To lash offence, and with long arms and hands
Reach'd out, and pick'd offenders from the mass
For judgment.

Now it chanced that I had been,
While life was yet in bud and blade, betroth'd
To one, a neighbouring Princess: she to me
Was proxy-wedded with a bootless calf

At eight years old; and still from time to time
Came murmurs of her beauty from the South,
And of her brethren, youths of puissance;
And still I wore her picture by my heart,
And one dark tress; and all around them both

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Sweet thoughts would swarm as bees about their queen.

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19. Court-Galen, court physician. Galen was a Greek (circa 130), and the name was long of great medical authority. The "gilt-head cane was characteristic of the physician in former times.

20. Catalepsy, the name of the disease attributed to the Prince. 23. Half-canonized, respected almost as if she had been really placed in the canon, or catalogue, of the saints of the Roman Catholic Church.

27. Pedant's wand, schoolmaster's rod.

33. Proxy-wedded, wedded with one who was the personal representative of the Prince, or his proxy.

With a bootless calf. The representative of the groom placed his unbooted leg to the knee in the bridal bed. The ceremony so practised was a marriage. Its validity as a marriage, in the present case, was broken because the Prince and the Princess were not of an age to contract in the eyes of the law; it could therefore be regarded only as an unusually formal betrothal.

But when the days drew nigh that I should wed,
My father sent ambassadors with furs

And jewels, gifts, to fetch her: these brought back
A present, a great labour of the loom;

And therewithal an answer vague as wind :
Besides, they saw the king; he took the gifts;
He said there was a compact; that was true:
But then she had a will; was he to blame?
And maiden fancies; loved to live alone
Among her women; certain, would not wed.

That morning in the presence-room I stood
With Cyril and with Florian, my two friends:
The first, a gentleman of broken means
(His father's fault) but given to starts and bursts
Of revel; and the last, my other heart,
And almost my half-self, for still we moved
Together, twinn'd as horse's ear and eye.

Now, while they spake, I saw my father's face Grow long and troubled, like a rising moon, Inflamed with wrath: he started on his feet, Tore the king's letter, snow'd it down, and rent The wonder of the loom thro' warp and woof From skirt to skirt; and at the last he sware That he would send a hundred thousand men, And bring her in a whirlwind: then he chew'd The thrice-turn'd cud of wrath, and cook'd his spleen, Communing with his captains of the war.

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50

60

53. Notice the characterization. Both Cyril and Florian remain to the end only what they are here stated to be—the first, a "greathearted gentleman," seeking to mend his means by a fit and ready wooing, yet without the baser touch of actual fortune-hunting; and the second a reflection of the Prince himself, his friend and otherself. The simile of the "horse's ear and eye" is, in its exactness, characteristic of Tennyson, but it is not noble.

62. Sware, swore.

65. Cook'd his spleen, a literal translation of a classical phrase

At last I spoke. "My father, let me go.
It cannot be but some gross error lies
In this report, this answer of a king
Whom all men rate as kind and hospitable :
Or, maybe, I myself, my bride once seen,
Whate'er my grief to find her less than fame,
May rue the bargain made." And Florian said :
"I have a sister at the foreign court,

Who moves about the Princess; she, you know,
Who wedded with a nobleman from thence:
He, dying lately, left her, as I hear,

The lady of three castles in that land :

Thro' her this matter might be sifted clean."
And Cyril whisper'd: "Take me with you too."
Then laughing "what, if these weird seizures come
Upon you in those lands, and no one near
To point you out the shadow from the truth!
Take me I'll serve you better in a strait ;

I grate on rusty hinges here :" but "No!"

Roar'd the rough king, "you shall not; we ourself
Will crush her pretty maiden fancies dead

In iron gauntlets: break the council up."

But when the council broke, I rose and past
Thro' the wild woods that hung about the town ;
Found a still place, and pluck'd her likeness out;
Laid it on flowers, and watch'd it lying bathed
In the green gleam of dewy-tassell'd trees :

What were those fancies ? wherefore break her troth?
Proud look'd the lips: but while I meditated,

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80

90

meaning nursed his wrath, suppressing it until some action should be decided upon.

84. Strait, difficulty.

86. We ourself, the royal style of speech used throughout the poem by the Kings and the Princess.

93. Dewy-tassell'd, budding with catkins. [Hallam Tennyson's note in Wallace.]

A wind arose and rush'd upon the South,

And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks
Of the wild woods together; and a Voice

Went with it, "Follow, follow, thou shalt win."

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Then, ere the silver sickle of that month
Became her golden shield, I stole from court
With Cyril and with Florian, unperceived,
Cat-footed thro' the town and half in dread
To hear my father's clamour at our backs
With Ho! from some bay-window shake the night;
But all was quiet from the bastion'd walls
Like threaded spiders, one by one, we dropt,
And flying reach'd the frontier: then we crost
To a livelier land; and so, by tilth and grange,
And vines, and blowing bosks of wilderness,
We gain'd the mother-city thick with towers,
And in the imperial palace found the king.

Tells.

His name was Gama; crack'd and small his voice, But bland the smile that like a wrinkling wind

On glassy water drove his cheek in lines;

A little dry old man, without a star,

Not like a king: three days he feasted us,
And on the fourth I spake of why we came,

And my betroth'd. "You do us, Prince," he said,
Airing a snowy hand and signet gem,

"All honour. We remember love ourselves

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120

100, 101. The poets often reckon time in a primitive way by the natural phenomena of the year, season, month, or day; the prose of the lines is before the new moon became full.

106. Bastion'd. A bastion is a particular kind of fortification. 109. Tilth, tilled ground. Grange, an outlying farmed estate, with special reference to its cluster of buildings.

110. Blowing bosks, blossoming wild shrubs in thickets.

111. Mother-city, the metropolis, or capital city.

116. Without a star, with no decoration of the orders of nobility. 120. Signet gem, a seal ring, the token of his authority and will.