‘......This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.’”
A moment she paused to think. The sun, lancing its long and level rays across the water and the vast dead city, irradiated her face.
Instinctively, as she looked abroad over that wondrous panorama, she raised both bare arms; and, clad in the tiger-skin alone, stood for a little space like some Parsee priestess, sun-worshiping, on her tower of silence.
Stern looked at her, amazed.
Was this, could this indeed be the girl he had employed, in the old days--the other days of routine and of tedium, of orders and specifications and dry-as-dust dictation? As though from a strange spell he aroused himself.
“The poem?” exclaimed he. “What next?”
“Oh, that? I'd almost forgotten about that; I was dreaming. It goes this way, I think:
‘Never did the sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill,
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep;
The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all this mighty heart is standing still!......’”
She finished the tremendous classic almost in a whisper.
They both stood silent a moment, gazing out together on that strange, inexplicable fulfilment of the poet's vision.