Explore "The Princess" by Alfred Tennyson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 walked and talked as heretofore, / I seemed to move among a world of ghosts, / And feel myself the shadow of a dream. / Our great court-Galen poised his gilt-head cane, / And pawed his beard, and muttered 'catalepsy'.