I hear the night-wind’s ghostly glove
Flutter the window: then the knob
Of some dark door turn, with a sob
As when love comes to gaze on love
Who lies pale-coffined in a room:
And then the iron gallop of
The storm, who rides outside, his plume
Sweeping the night with dread and gloom.
So fancy takes my mind, and paints
The darkness with eidolon light,
And writes the deads’ romance in white
On the dim Evening of All Saints:
Unheard the hissing nuts; the clink
Of falling coals, whose shadow faints
Around me where I sit and think,
Borne far beyond the actual’s brink.
LIII
No thing occult of Heaven or Earth,
Or influence of such, I feel
But hath a meaning and a worth
God, in His wisdom, doth conceal:
Reflections of another birth,
Existent with and kin to ours,
Announcing through supernal powers
Facts of a world it would reveal.
In Nature I perceive it, too,
This other life I can not see:
A spirit sparkles in the dew,
The trees have tongues that speak to me:
That Earth is green and Heaven, blue,
The sight alone may satisfy;
The soul sees with a different eye
The meaning ’neath the mystery.
LIV
The shadow of uncertain things
And all unearthly whisperings,—
That premonitions death and blight,—
Leans from the sepulchre of night;
And on the Earth fall shadowings;
And prophecies of near decay;
But, lovelier than a dead delight,
The starlit skies of glittering gray.
Still shall the Season claim and keep
Her wild-girl beauty; doubly deep
The purport of her dreams shall rise
Out of her heart into her eyes,
Till very dreaming makes her weep;
And death, with pale, pure lips and arms,
Shall touch her from the frosty skies,
Making a memory of her charms.
LV
Sometime shall Beauty hide no more
The fair conceptions she conceives
Beneath the abstract veil she weaves
Before her face the few adore;
The self-denying few, who long
Live lofty lives of art and song,
And, dying, leave the world less poor.
No more are these alone when she,
From the subjective world she rules,
Confronts the falsehood of the schools
With her high front of purity:
And on the dark and general way
Lets fall her individual ray
That low as well as high may see.