Oh, you who go hurrying, worrying by
With never a cry or a call,
Saw you a lad who was standing here
On the crest of the old sea wall?
I saw him last night in the twilight
As the long low breakers rolled,
And across the bay in the chapel
An evening bell was tolled.
And we looked at each other a moment
And then from each other we turned,
But I read in his eyes of a longing
That a merciless world had spurned.
Oh, have you no answer to make me,
All you who go hastening past,
And though I am late will none tell me
Where he was standing last?
Like a whisper I hear from the sea wall,
Where the waters are troubled below,
A murmur of wavelets complaining,
And the fate of the lad I know.
Spin onward, old world, to your ending.
The hearts that you break and condemn
Will someday rise madly against you,
Reversing your judgment of them.
THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN
Ten thousand trees in the forest stood
And watched me as I passed,
Ten thousand trees that did not breathe
The wind that rode as fast,
Ten thousand leaves on every tree
Immovably aghast!
The road in the light of the moon was white,
The sky overhead was gray,
With a kind of a washed, half-tone effect
That took the night away,
Yet to right and left like the cloak of death
The deepest darkness lay.
The steed’s quick breath his hooves beat out
And silvered all the air,
On, on we sped like a thing of dread;
We were a ghostly pair.
We passed the somber stricken wood;
We found no shelter there.