A RHAPSODY.
The following effort of a wild and maddened imagination, rioting in its own unreal world, is by the ‘American Opium-Eater,’ whose remarkable history was given in the Knickerbocker for July, 1842. The MS. is stained in several places with the powerful drug, to the abuse of which the writer was so irresistibly addicted. The subjoined remarks precede the poem: ‘This extravaganza is worthy of preservation only as ‘a psychological curiosity,’ like Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ which was composed under similar circumstances; if that indeed can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before the writer as THINGS, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking, he appeared to have a distinct recollection of the whole: taking his pen, ink and paper, he instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. The state of corporeal sleep but intellectual activity, during the continuance of which the phenomenon above described occurred, was caused by a very large dose of opium, and came upon me while reading the ‘Confession of a Fratricide,’ published by the priest who attended him in his last moments. I should warn the reader that the fratricide, like the author, could not be said to possess the ‘mens sana in corpore sano,’ both having been deranged.’
Ed. Knickerbocker.
The universe shook as the monarch passed
On the way to his northern throne;
His robe of snow around him he cast,
He rode on the wings of the roaring blast,
And beneath him dark clouds were blown.
His furrow’d and hoary brow was wreathed
With a crown of diamond frost;
Even space was chill’d wherever he breathed,
And the last faint smiles which summer bequeathed,
Ere she left the world, were lost.
The leaves which wan Autumn’s breath had seared
Stern Winter swept away;
Dark and dreary all earth appeared—
The very beams of the bright sun feared
To pursue their accustom’d way.
Mirth’s merry laugh at that moment fled,
And Pleasure’s fair cheek grew pale:
The living sat like the stony dead,
The rough torrent froze in its craggy bed,
And Heaven’s dew turned to hail.
The forest trees waved their heads on high,
And shrunk from the storm’s fierce stroke;
The lightning flash’d as from God’s own eye,
The thunderbolt crash’d through the startled sky,
As it split the defying oak.
The proud lion trembled and hush’d his roar,
The tigress crouch’d in fear;
The angry sea beat the shuddering shore,
And the deafening voice of the elements’ war
Burst terribly on the ear.
I stood by the bed where the prisoner lay;
The lamp gave a fitful light:
His soul was struggling to pass away;
Oh, God! how I pray’d for the coming of day!
Death was awful in such a night.
His cheek was hollow, and sunk, and wan,
And his lips were thin and blue;
The unearthly look of that dying man,
As his tale of horror he thus began,
Sent a chill my warm heart through:
‘The plague-spots of crime have sunk deep in my heart,
And withered my whirling brain;
The deep stamp of murder could never depart
From this brow, where the Angel of Death’s fiery dart
Had graven the curse of Cain.
‘Remorse has oft waved his dusky wings
O’er the path I was doom’d to tread;
Despair has long frozen Hope’s warm springs;
I have felt the soul’s madness which Memory brings,
When she wakes up the murder’d dead.
‘Tell me not now of God’s mercy or love!
All hope of pardon is past:
A brother’s blood cries for vengeance above;
This brand on my brow will my foul crime prove—
My torment for ever must last!
‘Thou needst not tremble; this arm is bound,
And its iron strength is gone;
Despair came down in the hollow sound
Of my fetters, which clank’d on the loathing ground
Where my wearied limbs I had thrown.
‘I snatched the knife from my jailor’s side
And buried it in my breast,
But they cruelly staunched the gushing tide,
And closed the wound, though ’twas deep and wide,
And still I might not rest!
‘Day after day I had gnawed my chain,
Till I sharpened the stubborn link;
But when I had pierced the swollen vein,
And was writhing in death’s last dreadful pain,
While just on eternity’s brink:
‘Even then the leech’s skill prevailed;
I was saved for a darker fate!
My very guards ’neath my stern glance quailed,
And with their cloaks their faces veiled
As they passed the fast-barred grate.
‘I LOVED! Thou know’st not half the power
Of woman’s love-lit eye;
Her voice can soothe death’s gloomy hour,
Her smiles dispel the clouds which lower
When Affliction’s sea rolls high.
‘My heart seemed cold as the frozen snow
Which binds dark Ætna’s form,
But Love raged there with the lava’s flow,
And madden’d my soul with the scorching glow
Of strong passion’s thunder-storm.’
‘I told my love: O God! even still
I hear the Tempter’s voice,
Which whispered the thought in my mind, to fill
My page of crime with a deed of ill
That made all hell rejoice.
‘I knelt at her feet, and my proud heart burn’d
When she spoke of my brother’s love;
Affection’s warmth to deep hate was turn’d;
His proffered hand in my wrath I spurn’d—
Not all his prayers could move.
‘At dead of night to his room I crept,
As noiseless as the grave;
Disturbed in his dreams, my brother wept,
And softly murmur’d her name while he slept;
That word new fury gave!
‘The sound from his lip had scarcely passed,
When my dagger pierced his heart:
One dying look on me he cast—
That awful look in my soul will last
When body and soul shall part!
‘When the deed was done, in horror I gazed
On the face of the murder’d dead;
His dark and brilliant eye was glazed:
When I thought for a moment his arm he raised,
I hid my face in the bed.
‘I could not move from the spot where I stood;
A chilliness froze my mind:
My clothes were dyed with my brother’s blood,
The body lay in a crimson flood,
Which clotted his hair behind!
‘And over my heart that moment pass’d
A vision of former years,
Ere sin upon my soul had cast
It’s withering blight, it’s poison-blast,
It’s cloud of guilty fears.
‘The home where our youth’s first hours flew by,
In its beauty before me rose;
The holy love of our mother’s eye,
Our childhood’s pure and cloudless sky
And its light and fleeting woes.
‘When our hearts in strong affection’s chain
Were so closely, fondly tied,
That our thoughts and feelings, pleasure and pain,
Were one: why did we not remain
Through life thus side by side?
‘And my brother’s gentle voice then fell
Upon my tortured ear;
Those tones I once had loved so well,
Now wither’d my soul like a flame from hell
With vain remorse and fear!
‘All, all that memory still had kept
In her hidden and silent reign,
My youth’s warm feelings, which long had slept,
Like a torrent of fire that moment swept
In madness o’er my brain.
‘For before me there his pallid face
In death’s cold stillness lay;
Even murder could not all efface
Its beauty, whose sad and shadowy trace
Still lingered round that clay.
‘Sternly I bent me over the dead,
And strove my breast to steel,
When the dagger from hilt to point blood-red,
Flash’d on my sight, and I madly fled,
The torture of life to feel.
‘Since that dread hour o’er half the earth
My weary path has lain;
I have stood where the mighty Nile has birth,
Where Ganges rolls his blue waves forth
In triumph to the main.
‘In the silent forest’s gloomy shade
I have vainly sought for rest;
My sunless dwelling I have made
Where the hungry tiger nightly stray’d,
And the serpent found a nest.
‘But still, where’er I turn’d, there lay
My brother’s lifeless form;
When I watched the cataract’s giant play
As it flung to the sky its foaming spray,
When I stood ’midst the rushing storm:
‘Still, still that awful face was shown,
That dead and soulless eye;
The breeze’s soft and soothing tone
To me still seemed his parting groan—
A sound I could not fly!
‘In the fearful silence of the night
Still by my couch he stood,
And when morn came forth in splendor bright,
Still there, between me and the light,
Was traced that scene of blood!’
·····
He paused: Death’s icy hand was laid
Upon his burning brow;
That eye, whose fiery glance had made
His sternest guards shrink back afraid,
Was glazed and sightless now.
And o’er his face the grave’s dark hue
Was in fixed shadow cast;
His spasm-drawn lips more fearful grew
In the ghastly shade of their lurid blue;
With a shudder that ran that cold form through,
The murderer’s spirit passed!