Page:Romance of the Rose (Ellis), volume 1.pdf/248

The silence, whose discordant song
Gives prophecy of woe and wrong,
Sad heralds, clad in hideousness.
Of evil happening and distress.6310

Fortune unsatisfying While winter doth to summer grow,
And summer fall to winter, flow
Two plenteous streams of diverse source,
And nought alike of kind or force.
The water of the one doth greet
All those who drink with savour sweet
Beyond compare, and he who tastes
Thereof but once, in nowise hastes
Him onward, but would gladly stay,
Drinking his fill, the livelong day;6320
But yet it quencheth not his thirst,
For eagerly as when he first
Had ta’en a sup, he drinketh still
As though no draught his pouch could fill.
The more one drinks the more doth he
Desire to quaff unendingly,
Nor doth his burning thirst abate,
Though he become intoxicate.

The strongest words were weak and waste
To tell the sweet enticing taste6330
These wretched sots experience, who,
Their drouth unquenched, must still pursue
Their maddening, monstrous draughts, for thirst
Infernal still, like souls accurst,
Consumes them, till at last they fall
Inflate, like victims dropsical.