In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough,
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough."

And again, among innumerable terrific images of death and slaughter
painted on the wall, is this one:

"The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and looked grim as he were wood.
A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete
With eyen red, and of a man he ete."

The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerk of Oxenforde,
who tells it, professes to have learned it from Petrarch. This story has
gone all over Europe, and has passed into a proverb. In spite of the
barbarity of the circumstances, which are abominable, the sentiment
remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, "that heaves no
sigh, that sheds no tear"; but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart;
it is a part of the very being; it is as inseparable from it as the
breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can
touch it in its ethereal purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is
fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only
complaint she utters against all the ill-treatment she receives, is that
single line where, when turned back naked to her father's house, she
says,

"Let me not like a worm go by the way."