LITMIR.BIZ

         The moon is alone in the sky

            As thou in my soul;

         The sea takes her image to lie

            Where the white ripples roll

               All night in a dream,

               With the light of her beam,

      Hushedly, mournfully, mistily up to the shore.

               The pebbles speak low

               In the ebb and the flow,

      As I when thy voice came at intervals, tuned to adore:

               Nought other stirred

               Save my heart all unheard

      Beating to bliss that is past evermore.

         A wicked man is bad enough on earth;

         But O the baleful lustre of a chief

         Once pledged in tyranny!  O star of dearth

         Darkly illumining a nation’s grief!

         How many men have worn thee on their brows!

         Alas for them and us!  God’s precious gift

         Of gracious dispensation got by theft—

         The damning form of false unholy vows!

         The thief of God and man must have his fee:

         And thou, John Lackland, despicable prince—

         Basest of England’s banes before or since!

         Thrice traitor, coward, thief!  O thou shalt be

         The historic warning, trampled and abhorr’d

      Who dared to steal and stain the symbols of the Lord!

      A Princess in the eastern tale

      Paced thro’ a marble city pale,

      And saw in ghastly shapes of stone

      The sculptured life she breathed alone;

      Saw, where’er her eye might range,

      Herself the only child of change;

      And heard her echoed footfall chime

      Between Oblivion and Time;

      And in the squares where fountains played,

      And up the spiral balustrade,

      Along the drowsy corridors,

      Even to the inmost sleeping floors,

      Surveyed in wonder chilled with dread

      The seemingness of Death, not dead;

      Life’s semblance but without its storm,

      And silence frosting every form;

      Crowned figures, cold and grouping slaves,

      Like suddenly arrested waves

      About to sink, about to rise,—

      Strange meaning in their stricken eyes;

      And cloths and couches live with flame

      Of leopards fierce and lions tame,

      And hunters in the jungle reed,

      Thrown out by sombre glowing brede;

      Dumb chambers hushed with fold on fold,

      And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold;

      White casements o’er embroidered seats,

      Looking on solitudes of streets,—

      On palaces and column’d towers,

      Unconscious of the stony hours;

      Harsh gateways startled at a sound,

      With burning lamps all burnish’d round;—

      Surveyed in awe this wealth and state,

      Touched by the finger of a Fate,

      And drew with slow-awakening fear

      The sternness of the atmosphere;—

      And gradually, with stealthier foot,

      Became herself a thing as mute,

      And listened,—while with swift alarm

      Her alien heart shrank from the charm;

      Yet as her thoughts dilating rose,

      Took glory in the great repose,

      And over every postured form

      Spread lava-like and brooded warm,—

      And fixed on every frozen face

      Beheld the record of its race,

      And in each chiselled feature knew

      The stormy life that once blushed thro’;—

      The ever-present of the past

      There written; all that lightened last,

      Love, anguish, hope, disease, despair,

      Beauty and rage, all written there;—

      Enchanted Passions! whose pale doom

      Is never flushed by blight or bloom,

      But sentinelled by silent orbs,

      Whose light the pallid scene absorbs.—

      Like such a one I pace along

      This City with its sleeping throng;

      Like her with dread and awe, that turns

      To rapture, and sublimely yearns;—

      For now the quiet stars look down

      On lights as quiet as their own;

      The streets that groaned with traffic show

      As if with silence paved below;

      The latest revellers are at peace,

      The signs of in-door tumult cease,

      From gay saloon and low resort,

      Comes not one murmur or report:

      The clattering chariot rolls not by,

      The windows show no waking eye,

      The houses smoke not, and

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