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MAZEPPA.
7
The fever in his blood forbade
A transient slumber’s fitful aid:
And thus it was; but yet through all,
Kinglike the monarch bore his fall,40
And made, in this extreme of ill,
His pangs the vassals of his will;
All silent and subdued were they,
As once the nations round him lay.
III.
A band of chiefs!—alas! how few,
Since but the fleeting of a day
Had thinn’d it; but this wreck was true
And chivalrous: upon the clay
Each sate him down, all sad and mute,
Beside his monarch and his steed,50
For danger levels man and brute,
And all are fellows in their need.
Among the rest, Mazeppa made
His pillow in an old oak’s shade—
Himself as rough, and scarce less old,
The Ukraine’s hetman, calm and bold;
