Gods of the old mythology
Arise in gloom and storm;
Adramalec, bow down thy head,
Reveal, dark fiend, thy form.
The giant sons of Anakim
Bowed lowest at thy shrine,
And thy temple rose in Argola,
With its hallowed groves of vine;
And there was eastern incense burnt,
And there were garments spread,
With the fine gold decked and broidered,
And tinged with radiant red,
With the radiant red of furnace flames
That through the shadows shone
As the full moon when on Sinai's top
Her rising light is thrown.
It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Brontë that I should not be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least one reassuring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ring of the Brontësque.
And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:
No; though the soil be wet with tears,
How fair so'er it grew,
The vital sap once perished
Will never flow again;
And surer than that dwelling dread,
The narrow dungeon of the dead,
Time parts the hearts of men.
And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:
In plundered churches piled with dead
The heavy charger neighed for food,
The wounded soldier laid his head
'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.
Again, she has a vision:
In all the hours of gloom
My soul was rapt away.
I stood by a marble tomb
Where royal corpses lay.
A frightful thing appears to her, "a shadowy thing, most dim":
And still it bent above,
Its features still in view;
It seemed close by; and yet more far
Than this world from the farthest star
That tracks the boundless blue.