"How sayest thou, O Hilda, that the dead are still?" Hilda placed her
hand on his shoulder, and stooped to look into his face.

"Thy rebuke is just, son of Sweyn. In Time, and in the Universe,
there is no stillness! Through all eternity the state impossible to
the soul is repose!--So again thou art in thy native land?"

"And for what end, Prophetess? I remember, when but an infant, who
till then had enjoyed the common air and the daily sun, thou didst rob
me evermore of childhood and youth. For thou didst say to my father,
that 'dark was the woof of my fate, and that its most glorious hour
should be its last!'"

"But thou wert surely too childlike, (see thee now as thou wert then,
stretched on the grass, and playing with thy father's falcon!)--too
childlike to heed my words."

"Does the new ground reject the germs of the sower, or the young heart
the first lessons of wonder and awe? Since then, Prophetess, Night
hath been my comrade, and Death my familiar. Rememberest thou again
the hour when, stealing, a boy, from Harold's house in his absence--
the night ere I left my land--I stood on this mound by thy side? Then
did I tell thee that the sole soft thought that relieved the
bitterness of my soul, when all the rest of my kinsfolk seemed to
behold in me but the heir of Sweyn, the outlaw and homicide, was the
love that I bore to Harold; but that that love itself was mournful and
bodeful as the hwata [209] of distant sorrow. And thou didst take me,
O Prophetess, to thy bosom, and thy cold kiss touched my lips and my
brow; and there, beside this altar and grave-mound, by leaf and by