Chapter V

And the east grew gold with burning bars,
And the sun in his chariot came;
And this princess proud saw her lord of stars
Snuffed out like a taper’s flame:
And higher the lord of the light and hours
Glared up the glittering sky,
And the fragile queen of the morning flowers
In his beams did wilt and die:
But the jessamine waxed in the sun-god’s ray,
And her breath and her beauty made sweet the day.

THE TOAD IN THE SKULL

A human skull in a churchyard lay;
For the church was a wreck, and, toppling old,
On the graves of their dead, were the tombstones gray,
And crumbling into mold.

And a hideous toad of this skull had made
A house, a hermitage, long agone,
Where the ivy-tod with many a braid
Half-hid his cell of bone.

And the place was dark; and my feet were drawn
To the desolate spot where the tottering tombs
Seemed sheeted ghosts in the twilight wan
Of the yew-invested glooms.

The night her crescent had slimly hung
From a single star o’er the shattered wall,
And its feeble light on the stone was flung
Where I sat to hear him call.

And I heard this heremite toad as he sate
In the gloom of his ghastly hermitage
To himself and the gloom all hollowly prate,
Like a misanthropic sage:

“Oh, beauty is well and wealth to all;
But wealth without beauty _makes_ fair:
And beauty with wealth brings wooers tall
Whom she snares with her golden hair.

“Though beauty be well and be wealth to all,
And wealth without beauty draw men,
Beauty must come to the vaulted wall,
And what is wealth to her then?...

“This skeleton face was beautiful erst;
These sockets were brighter than stars;
And she bartered her beauty for gold accurst--
But the story is older than Mars!” ...

And he blinked at the moon from his grinning cell,
And the darnels and burdocks were stirred,
Cold-swept of the wind, and I shuddered.--Well!
Perhaps ’twas my heart I had heard.

THE MOONMEN

I stood in the forest on Huron Hill
When the night was old and the world was still.

The Wind was a wizard who muttering strode
In a raven cloak on a haunted road.

The Sound of Water, a witch who crooned
Her spells to the rocks the rain had runed.

And the Gleam of the Dew on the fern’s green tip
Was a sylvan passing with robe a-drip.

The Light of the Stars was a glimmering maid
Who stole, an elfin, from glade to glade.

The Scent of the Woods in the delicate air,
A wild-flower shape with chilly hair.

And Silence, a spirit who sat alone
With lifted finger and eyes of stone.

And it seemed to me these six were met
To greet a greater who came not yet.

And the speech they spoke, that I listened to,
Was the archetype of the speech I knew.

For the Wind clasped hands with the Water’s rush,
And I heard them whisper, “Hush, oh, hush!”

The Light of the Stars and the Dew’s cool Gleam
Touched lips and murmured, “Dream, oh, dream!”

The Scent of the Woods and the Silence deep
Sighed, bosom to bosom, “Sleep, oh, sleep!”

And so for a moment the six were dumb,
Then exulted together, “They come, they come!”

And I stood expectant and seemed to hear
A visible music drawing near.

And the first who came was the Captain Moon
Bearing a shield in God’s House hewn.

Then an Army of Glamour, a glittering host,
Beleaguered the night from coast to coast.

And the world was filled with spheric fire
From the palpitant chords of many a lyre,

As out of the East the Moonmen came
Smiting their harps of silver and flame.

More beauty and grace did their forms express
Than the God of Love’s white nakedness.

More chastity too their faces held
Than the snowy breasts of Diana swelled.

Translucent-limbed, I saw the beat
In their hearts of pearl of the golden heat.

And the hair they tossed was a crystal light,
And the eyes beneath it were burning white.

Their hands that lifted, their feet that fell,
Made the darkness blossom to asphodel.

And the heavens, the hills, and the streams they trod
Shone pale with th’ communicated God.

A placid frenzy, a waking trance,
A soft oracular radiance,

Wrapped forms that moved as melodies move,
Laurelled with Godhead and haloed with Love.

And there in the forest on Huron Hill
The Moonmen camped when the world was still.

* * * * *

What wonder that they who have looked on these
Are lost to the earth’s realities!

That they sit aside with a far-off look
Dreaming the dreams that are writ in no book!

That they walk alone till the day they die,
Even as I, yea, even as I!

PHANTOMS

This was her home; one mossy gable thrust
Above the cedars and the locust trees:
This was her home, whose beauty now is dust,
A lonely memory for melodies
The wild birds sing, the wild birds and the bees.

Here every evening is a prayer: no boast
Or ruin of sunset makes the wan world wroth;
Here, through the twilight, like a pale flower’s ghost,
A drowsy flutter, flies the tiger-moth;
And dusk spreads darkness like a dewy cloth.

In vagabond velvet, all the placid day
A stain of crimson, lolls the butterfly;
The south-wind sows with ripple and with ray
The pleasant waters; and the gentle sky
Looks on the homestead like a quiet eye.

Their melancholy quaver, lone and low,
When day is done, the gray tree-toads repeat:
The whippoorwills, far in the afterglow,
Complain to silence: and the lightnings beat,
In one still cloud, glimmers of golden heat.

He comes not yet: not till the dusk is dead,
And all the western glow is far withdrawn;
Not till,--a sleepy mouth love’s kiss makes red,--
The baby bud opes in a rosy yawn,
Breathing sweet guesses of the dreamed-of dawn.

When in the shadows, like a rain of gold,
The fireflies stream steadily; and bright
Along the moss the glow-worm, as of old,
A crawling sparkle--like a crooked light
In smoldering vellum--scrawls a square of night,--

Then will he come, and she will lean to him,--
She who is buried there, within that place,--
Between the starlight and his eyes; so dim
With suave control and soul-compelling grace,
He can not help but see her, face to face.

THE HOUSE OF DEATH

(A Dream)

I

Starless and still and lustreless
And sombre black, it seemed to me,
The heaven hung in hideousness
Of Hell’s serenity:
Indefinite and vague and old
As nothing that is ours,
It rose turrets, dark with mould,
And dark, colossal towers.

II

Infernal monsters crumbled ’mid
The trefoils of its dim façade,
And, hideous as murder, hid
Gnarled in the pillared shade.
And all below and overhead,
In cancerous blotches, grew
The gray gangrene of lichens dead,
And fungus, sickly blue.

III

Beneath the black, impending skies,
Like Death’s dead countenance it stood,
Hollow, with cavernous window-eyes
Staring on solitude.
The grass was black, and in it, white
The tombstones rose; and gray,
Long league on league, adown the night,
Like phantoms, stretched away.

IV

And I, who entered in, could hear
No organ notes resound and roll,
But silence, like an awful fear,
Made tumult in my soul.
And, lo! I saw, like Hell’s wild songs,
The vast interior carved
With shapes of stone, vague woman throngs,
Naked, obscene, and starved.

V

Medusa mouths and harpy hands,
And Gorgon eyes where death abode;
Like idols, wherein heathen lands
Image the Plague’s black god.
Round mighty door and window-frame,
On floor and vault, behold,
The chiselled forms were all the same--
Gray with exuding mold.