But earnestly gazed on the bride.
His vizor was closed, and gigantic his height;
His armour was sable to view:
All pleasure and laughter were hushed at his sight;
The dogs as they eyed him drew back in affright;
The lights in the chamber burned blue!
His presence all bosoms appeared to dismay;
The guests sat in silence and fear.
At length spoke the bride, while she trembled; “I pray,
Sir Knight, that your helmet aside you would lay,
And deign to partake of our chear.”
The lady is silent: the stranger complies.
His vizor he slowly unclosed:
Oh! God! what a sight met Fair Imogine’s eyes!
What words can express her dismay and surprise,
When a skeleton’s head was exposed!
All present then uttered a terrified shout;
All turned with disgust from the scene.
The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out,
And sported his eyes and his temples about,
While the spectre addressed Imogine.
“Behold me, thou false one! behold me!” he cried;
“Remember Alonzo the Brave!
God grants, that to punish thy falsehood and pride
My ghost at thy marriage should sit by thy side,
Should tax thee with perjury, claim thee as bride,
And bear thee away to the grave!”
Thus saying, his arms round the lady he wound,
While loudly she shrieked in dismay;
Then sank with his prey through the wide-yawning ground:
Nor ever again was Fair Imogine found,
Or the spectre who bore her away.
Not long lived the Baron; and none since that time
To inhabit the castle presume;
For chronicles tell that, by order sublime,
There Imogine suffers the pain of her crime,
And mourns her deplorable doom.
At midnight four times in each year does her spright,
When mortals in slumber are bound,
Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white,
Appear in the hall with the Skeleton-Knight,
And shriek as he whirls her around.
While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave,
Dancing round them the spectres are seen:
Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave
They howl:—“To the health of Alonzo the Brave,
And his consort, the False Imogine!”
The perusal of this story was ill calculated to dispel Antonia’s melancholy. She had naturally a strong inclination to the marvellous; and her nurse, who believed firmly in apparitions, had related to her, when an infant, so many horrible adventures of this kind, that all Elvira’s attempts had failed to eradicate their impressions from her daughter’s mind. Antonia still nourished a superstitious prejudice in her bosom: she was often susceptible of terrors, which, when she discovered their natural and insignificant cause, made her blush at her own weakness. With such a turn of mind, the adventure which she had just been reading sufficed to give her apprehensions the alarm. The hour and the scene combined to authorise them. It was the dead of night; she was alone, and in the
