VISIONS.
FROM THE FRENCH OF ALFRED DE MUSSET.
One midnight when I was a wayward child,
I read by stealth a romance weird and wild;
My veins were tingling and my cheeks aflame,
When suddenly before my vision came
Two sad dark eyes appealing wistfully,
A child in sable garb who looked like me.
A child so like to me in form and face,
It seemed a mirror standing in the place.
He cast on me one long and earnest look,
Then bent with me o’er the forbidden book.
A smile mysterious he wore, but never spoke,
And vanished from me as the daylight broke.
The years sped by; one dreamy autumn day
The eager chase had led me far astray;
Fantastic shadows thronged the solitude
Of the deep mountain forest where I stood,
And there appeared beneath a spreading tree,
A wanderer dressed in black, who looked like me.
He held a quaint old lute and a fresh spray
Of eglantine; I gently asked my way.
He answered me no word, but took with pride
A path straight up the towering mountain side.
His parting glance fell on me with a thrill
Of meaning so intense it haunts me still.
Another year sped by; one night outside
The room wherein my sainted mother died
I stood alone, and friendless with my grief—
Youth’s crushing grief that hopes not for relief,—
I oped the door, lo, there on bended knee
An orphan dressed in black who looked like me.
Kneeling before the sacred ashes there
He seemed a radiant angel in despair.
His face was bathed in tears, his head was crowned
With thorns, his lute was flung upon the ground,
And o’er his sable garments flowed a tide
Of crimson from the sword that pierced his side.
Since then in every crisis I have known,
Whether in busy town or desert lone,
Angel or demon, whichsoe’er it be,
That sable apparition comes to me.
I never hear his voice, he stands apart,
Yet like a brother twines about my heart.
Now, all my idols burned in civil strife,
Willing to love or re-create my life,
My feet, self-exiled from their natal strand,
Gather the dust of many a foreign land;
A labyrinthine maze I vainly grope,
Seeking the faint, vague vestige of a hope.
Still in those moments when life’s pulses go
Surging almost to fatal overflow,
When the blind, fettered spirit seems at last
Ready its fetters and its scales to cast,
Before my vision comes, on land or sea,
A wanderer, dressed in black, who looks like me.