Note 529 — CANTO THE FOURTH[375]
Reading edition
[It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, Sur l'Insanité, which Milman turned to account in his Belvidere Apollo, a Newdigate Prize Poem of 1812—
"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep, 'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove, Too fair to worship, too divine to love. Yet on that form in wild delirious trance With more than rev'rence gazed the Maid of France, Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood With him alone, nor thought it solitude! To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care, Her one fond hope—to perish of despair."
Milman's Poetical Works, Paris, 1829, p. 180.
Compare, too, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, lines 14-16—
"A savage place, as holy and enchanted, As e'er beneath a wailing moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
Poetical Works, 1893, p. 94.]