How Lisa Loved the King (Paperback)

An excerpt of a review from "The Saturday Review":
A romantic story in ten-syllable couplets is the last thing one would have expected George Eliot to write, but she has written it with beauty and facility; and if the condensed gravity of her habitual manner is not altogether forgotten, we find a little composure by no means amiss in the face of a modern school of garrulous and unbridled verse. A love-song which occurs in the poem is perhaps the passage which departs most from George Eliot's usual type. An extract from this will show that she need not fear meeting Mr. Morris on his own ground: -
"O Love, who so didst choose me for thine own,
Taking this little isle to thy great sway,
See now, it is the honour of thy throne
That what thou gavest perish not away,
Nor leave some sweet remembrance to atone
By life that will be for the brief life none:
Hear, ere the shroud o'er these frail limbs be thrown-
Since every king is vassal unto thee.
My heart's lord needs must listen loyally-
O tell him I am waiting for my Death
Tell him, for that he hath such royal power,
'Twere hard for him to think how small a thing.
How slight a sign, would make a wealthy dower
For one like me, the bride of that pale king
Whose bed is mine at some swift-nearing hour.
Go to my lord, and to his memory bring
That happy birthday of my sorrowing
When his large glance made meaner gazers glad,
Entering the bannered lists: 'twas then I had
The wound that laid me in the arms of Death.
"
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"How Lisa Loved the King," is suggested by the bright pages of Boccaccio, has also an adventitious interest, as the last of her contributions that appeared in Blackwood. Though not published till 1869, it was written six years before, and is probably the earliest of her recorded poetical productions, though she wrote in verse at a much earlier period.