From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,
The winds,—the sowers of the Lord,—with thunderous footsteps stride;
Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,
Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.
The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;
And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell
Glimmers; while wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell
Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.
The oaks against a copper sky—o'er which, like some black lake
Of Dis, dark clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break—
Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales, that make
A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.
Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a Limbo-litten pane,
Within its wall of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,
On which the wild geese ink themselves, a far triangled train;
And then the shuttering clouds close down—and night is here again.
The Legend of the Stone.
The year was dying, and the day
Was almost dead;
The West, beneath a sombre gray,
Was sombre red.
The gravestones in the ghostly light,
'Mid trees half bare,
Seemed phantoms, clothed in glimmering white,
That haunted there.
I stood beside the grave of one,
Who, here in life,
Had wronged my home; who had undone
My child and wife.
I stood beside his grave until
The moon came up—
As if the dark, unhallowed hill
Lifted a cup.
No stone was there to mark his grave,
No flower to grace—
'T was meet that weeds alone should wave
In such a place.
I stood beside his grave until
The stars swam high,
And all the night was iron still
From sky to sky.