LITMIR.BIZ

      Then up he sprung, and with his knife —

            And with his knife

      He let out jeering Johnny’s life,

         Yes; there, at set of sun.

      The slant ray through the window nigh

      Gilded John’s blood and glazing eye,

      Ere scarcely Mother Lee and I

         Knew that the deed was done.

      The taverns tell the gloomy tale,

            The gloomy tale,

      How that at Ivel-chester jail

         My Love, my sweetheart swung;

      Though stained till now by no misdeed

      Save one horse ta’en in time o’ need;

      (Blue Jimmy stole right many a steed

         Ere his last fling he flung.)

      Thereaft I walked the world alone,

            Alone, alone!

      On his death-day I gave my groan

         And dropt his dead-born child.

      ’Twas nigh the jail, beneath a tree,

      None tending me; for Mother Lee

      Had died at Glaston, leaving me

         Unfriended on the wild.

      And in the night as I lay weak,

            As I lay weak,

      The leaves a-falling on my cheek,

         The red moon low declined —

      The ghost of him I’d die to kiss

      Rose up and said: “Ah, tell me this!

      Was the child mine, or was it his?

         Speak, that I rest may find!”

      O doubt not but I told him then,

            I told him then,

      That I had kept me from all men

         Since we joined lips and swore.

      Whereat he smiled, and thinned away

      As the wind stirred to call up day.

      – ’Tis past!  And here alone I stray

         Haunting the Western Moor.

         The dubious daylight ended,

      And I walked the Town alone, unminding whither bound and why,

      As from each gaunt street and gaping square a mist of light ascended

         And dispersed upon the sky.

         Files of evanescent faces

      Passed each other without heeding, in their travail, teen, or joy,

      Some in void unvisioned listlessness inwrought with pallid traces

         Of keen penury’s annoy.

         Nebulous flames in crystal cages

      Leered as if with discontent at city movement, murk, and grime,

      And as waiting some procession of great ghosts from bygone ages

         To exalt the ignoble time.

         In a colonnade high-lighted,

      By a thoroughfare where stern utilitarian traffic dinned,

      On a red and white emblazonment of players and parts, I sighted

         The name of “Rosalind,”

         And her famous mates of “Arden,”

      Who observed no stricter customs than “the seasons’ difference” bade,

      Who lived with running brooks for books in Nature’s wildwood garden,

         And called idleness their trade.

         Now the poster stirred an ember

      Still remaining from my ardours of some forty years before,

      When the selfsame portal on an eve it thrilled me to remember

         A like announcement bore;

         And expectantly I had entered,

      And had first beheld in human mould a Rosalind woo and plead,

      On whose transcendent figuring my speedy soul had centred

         As it had been she indeed.

         So; all other plans discarding,

      I resolved on entrance, bent on seeing what I once had seen,

      And approached the gangway of my earlier knowledge, disregarding

         The tract of time between.

         “The words, sir?” cried a creature

      Hovering mid the shine and shade as ’twixt the live world and the tomb;

      But the well-known numbers needed not for me a text or teacher

         To revive and re-illume.

         Then the play.. But how unfitted

      Was this Rosalind! – a mammet quite to me, in memories nurst,

      And with chilling disappointment soon I sought the street I had quitted,

         To re-ponder on the first.

         The

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