XXXI
Past midnight, gathering from the west,
With rolling rain the storm came on,
And tore and tossed until the dawn,
Like some dark demon of unrest:
The stairways creaked! the chimneys boomed;
I heard the wild leaves blown about
The windy windows; and the shout
Of forests that the storm had doomed.
I listened, and remembered how
On yesterday I went alone
A sunlit path through fields o’ergrown
With sumac brakes, turned crimson now;
Where asters strung blue pearls and white
Beside the goldenrod’s soft ruff;
Where thistles, silvery puff on puff,
Danced many a twinkling witch’s-light.
Her joy the Autumn uttered so
To skies where gold and azure blent;
Now storm is the embodiment
Of all her utterance of woe:
The two within me so abide,
That of the two my mind partakes,—
As one, who walks asleep, awakes,
Walks on and thinks, “To-night I died.”
XXXII
What sympathies of Heaven and Earth
The human ego enters in!
The universal stain of sin
Which qualifies it from its birth,
Denying it their highest worth.
There is a parallel of kin
’Twixt earth and man, that dignifies
Endeavor with such sympathies.
The all mysterious wisdom waits
In mountain, wood, and waterfall,
Sky, rock and sea, to hear the call
Of something—firmer than the Fates—
Deep in the soul it elevates;
And to the splendor of the All
Advances, through the night’s immense,
The spirit of experience.
So think I now while, long and loud,
The wind its maniac music beats,
And storm a madman’s song repeats
To echoes in the rushing cloud;
While all the world to wrath is vowed,
And nothing conquers or defeats
The darkness and the rain that raves
Above the all-unheeding graves.
XXXIII
All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves
Around my window; and the blast
Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast
The storm streamed from the dripping eaves.
As if—’neath skies gone mad with fear—
The witches’ Sabboth galloped past,
The forests leapt like startled deer.
All night I heard the sweeping sleet;
And when the morning came, as slow
As pale affliction, with the woe
Of all the world dragged at her feet,
No spear of purple shattered through
The dark-gray of the east; no bow
Of gold, whose arrows cleft the blue.