A NIGHT IN NAPLES.
This is the one night in all the year
When the faithful of Naples who love their priest
May find their faith and their wealth increased;
For just as the stroke of midnight is here,
Those who with faithful undoubting mind
Their "Aves" mutter, their rosaries tell,
They without doubt shall a recompence find;
Yea, their faith indeed shall profit them well.
Therefore, to-night, in the hot thronged street
By San Gennaro's, the people devout,
With banner, and relic, and thurible meet,
With some sacred image to marshal them out.
For a few days hence, the great lottery
Of the sinful city declared will be,
And it may be that Aves and Paters said
Will bring some aid from the realms of the dead.
And so to the terrible place of the tomb
They go forth, a pitiful crowd, through the gloom,
To where all the dead of the city decay,
Waiting the trump of the judgment day.
For every day of the circling year
Brings its own sum of corruption here;
Every day has its great pit, fed
With the dreadful heap of the shroudless dead
And behind a grated rust-eaten door,
Marked each with their fated month and day,
The young and the old, who in life were poor,
Fester together and rot away.
Silence is there, the silence of death,
And in silence those poor pilgrims wearily pace,
And the wretched throng, pitiful, holding its breath,
Comes with shuffling steps to the dreadful place.
Till before these dark portals, the silent crowd
Breaks at length into passionate suffrages loud,
Waiting the flickering vapour thin,
Bred of the dreadful corruption within.