Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies,
For meet adornment a full thousand years;
She took their cream of beauty, fairest dyes,
And shap’d and tinted her above all peers
Meanwhile love kept her dearly with his wings,
And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes
With such a richness that the cloudy kings
Of high olympus utter’d slavish sighs.
When from the heavens I saw her first descend,
My heart took fire, and only burning pains,
They were my pleasures — they my life’s sad end;
Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins . . .
