Chapter III

Where was I last Friday night?--
Within the Forest of dark Dreams
Seeing the mists rise left and right,
Like the leathery fog that heaves and steams
From the rolling horror of Hell's red streams:
While the wind, that tossed in the tattered tree,
And danced alone with the last mad leaf--
Or _was_ it the wind?... kept whispering me,
"Come! bury it here with its own black grief,
And its heart of fire that naught can save!"--
And there in the darkness I seemed to see
My own self digging my soul a grave.

THE CITY OF DARKNESS

Wide-walled it stands in heathen lands
Beside a mystic sea,
Its streets strange-trod of many a god
And templed blasphemy.

Far through the night, with light on light,
It flames beside the sea;
While overhead an unseen dread
Impends eternally.

There is a sound above, around,
Of music by the sea;
And weird and wide the torches glide
Of pagan revelry.

There is a noise as of a voice
That calls beneath the sea;
And all the deep heaves, as in sleep,
With vague expectancy.

Then slowly up--as in a cup
Seethes poison--swells the sea;
As through black glass, wild mass on mass,
The town glows fiery.

Red-lit it glowers, like Hell's dark towers,
Closed in the iron sea;
And monster forms in awful swarms
Wing round it cloudily.

Still overhead the unseen dread,
Whose shadow dyes the sea,
At wrath-winged wait behind its gate
Till God shall set it free.

An earthquake crash; a taloned flash--
And, lo! from sky to sea
A sworded Doom that stalks the gloom,
Crowned with Death's agony.

And where it burned, a flame inurned,
Blood-red within the sea,
The phantasm of the dread above
Sits in immensity.

UNDER DARK SKIES

I

Hills rolled in woods, that lair the lynx and fox;
Harsh fields, that lean before the woods' advance
As wild-men fly from hunters, tossing locks
Through which their eyes of yellow fire glance;
Great blurs of briers and lugubrious rocks,--
A bristling blackness,--with a pool beneath,
Whereo'er the wisps, like something evil, dance;
And then a house like the wrecked face of death.

II

There where the moon hangs sinister, o'er parched
And haggard thorns,--a golden battle-bow,
Or shield of bronze, old wars have scarred and scorched,--
What crime hath cursed it ... who shall ever know?--
Night only! Night, with flickering flame, who torched
That moment when blood branded black its sod,
And in the pool a ghastly face sank slow
Beneath the storm and rushing fire of God.

REMBRANDTS

I

I shall not soon forget her and her eyes,
The haunts of hate, where suffering seemed to write
Its stealthy name, whose syllables are sighs,
In strange and starless night.

I shall not soon forget her and her face,
So quiet, yet uneasy as a dream
That stands on tip-toe in a haunted place
And listens for a scream.

She made me feel as one, alone, may feel
In some grand, ghostly mansion of old time,
The presence of a treasure, walls conceal,
And secret of a crime.

II

With lambent faces, mimicking the moon,
The water lilies lie;
Dotting the darkness of the long lagoon
As stars, the sky.

A face, the whiteness of a water-flower,
With pollen-golden hair,
In shadow half, half in the moonlight's glower,
Lifts slowly there.

A young girl's face, death makes mute marble of,
Turned to the moon and me,
Sad with the pathos of unspeakable love,
Floating to sea.