But when the dead were carried to their rest,
Its dirges were of all most wonderful,
A depth of sadness—such as none can tell—
A sadness which the gayest did compel
To see a shadow of the ghastly skull,
And yet to feel that even the grave is blest.
V
In all these cadences Sordino found
A true delight, but most in solemn dirge,
For melancholy was his common mood,
Though sometimes he was in an altitude
Of such hilarity, that it did verge
Upon the wildness of a mind unsound.
Indeed, the whisper passed, he was insane,
Since only one with shattered reason could
Half of his fortune spend for such a thing:
To hear a set of golden churchbells ring,
And none of his few friends quite understood
His pleasure in a funeral refrain.
He loved to walk ’mongst tombs and ancient graves,
And read the epitaphs on crumbling stones,
Or muse beside some gloomy cypress tree,
While list’ning to a mournful melody,
Mark how the harmony of all the tones
Did vanish far away o’er sunlit waves.
He was a seeker after harmony,
Such harmony in which all life shall blend,
In perfect peace and concord, this he heard
Expressed in those deep tones which moved and stirred
His brooding mind, and seemed an answer lend
To all its questions of life’s destiny.
Unhappiness had marred his early life;
His marriage to a girl who loved him not,
And yet who lived within his childless home,
For binding was the tie once made by Rome,
Until at last her ways became a blot,
And by her sins she ceased to be his wife.
Since then he lived a recluse more or less,
Except when boon-companions with him met,
To dine, or rather to a revelry,
When wine and music set his spirit free,
When he life’s disappointments could forget,
And when some transient bliss he did caress.
But feasts, of such a nature, yearly grew
Less frequent, for his real self was good,
And governed him, as he in age advanced;
And now the chimes his being so entranced,
That all the hunger of his heart found food
In their sweet intonations, ever new.
They fed his innate philosophic bent,
And made him delve into the subtlest lore
Of Metaphysics and Theology,
That he through these, perchance, might clearer see
The truth which echoed from another shore,
Each time their sovereign voice the silence rent.