Tales of a Wayside Inn

Well pleased all listened to the tale, / That drew, the Student said, its pith / And marrow from the ancient myth / Of some one with an iron flail; / Or that portentous Man of Brass / Hephestus made in days of yore, / Who stalked about the Cretan shore, / And saw the ships appear and pass, / And threw stones at the Argonauts, / Being filled with indiscriminate ire / That tangled and perplexed his thoughts; / But, like a hospitable host, / When strangers landed on the coast, / Heated himself red-hot with fire, / And hugged them in his arms, and pressed / Their bodies to his burning breast.

The Poet answered: "No, not thus / The legend rose; it sprang at first / Out of the hunger and the thirst / In all men for the marvellous. / And thus it filled and satisfied / The imagination of mankind, / And this ideal to the mind / Was truer than historic fact. / Fancy enlarged and multiplied / The tenors of the awful name / Of Charlemagne, till he became / Armipotent in every act, / And, clothed in mystery, appeared / Not what men saw, but what they feared. / Besides, unless my memory fail, / Your some one with an iron flail / Is not an ancient myth at all, / But comes much later on the scene / As Talus in the Faerie Queene, / The iron groom of Artegall, / Who threshed out falsehood and deceit, / And truth upheld, and righted wrong, / As was, as is the swallow, fleet, / And as the lion is, was strong."