Ah! not the unimprisoned shadows,
Which dwell in the Elysian meadows,
Released from pain, and want, and care,
And doubt and sorrow and despair;
Nor such as timid wanderers meet,
When the moon is struggling under a cloud,
With bony fingers and skeleton feet,
And grinning skulls and ghastly shroud,
But the nameless troop which lawless thought
To the poet’s wildest dream has brought,
The brood which dark remorse might view
When justice comes to claim her due;
Strange somethings of more frightful mien
Than mortal eye has ever seen.
O! sacred sleep, once more descend,
And seal these throbbing, aching eyes,
Thou art the sufferer’s truest friend,
And bringest balm from Paradise,
Distilled from groves which never cast
Their leaves from worm, or winter’s blast.
Hush!—’Twas as if some murmured strain,
Well known in childhood’s happy hours,
Came wafted o’er a desolate plain,
On winds impregnated with flowers,
And then they vanish—like the lambent light
That flashes through a tempest cloud at night
Lo! Dreamland’s terrible array,
Advances still—Away, away!—
Down through the dark Cimmerian glen
Stained with the blood of murdered men,
Far from the beams of the friendly sun
When “deeds without a name” are done,
And the night-hags hold their dance of death
Around the cauldron of Macbeth;
Where the sire fell by the hand of the son—
A stab, a groan, and the crime was done;
Where the duelist sped the ball of death,
And the mother stifled the infant’s breath,
Under yon gloomy cypress’ shade
By the lonely grave of the beautiful maid,
Murdered by him who had betrayed,
Where her spectre glides at dead of night
With clots of gore on her bosom white;
Where on a gibbet the murderer swings
Waving his fleshless arms like wings—
I fled, nor quaked at the hideous sight,
For life and death were in my flight.
Across the burning desert’s waste
Where the path by skeletons is traced,
And the bones of the caravan welter and bleach
As thick as the shells on the ocean’s beach,
Swift as the winged winds I fly,
And my swollen lips are all cracked and dry,
And I plead in vain to the rainless sky,
While my bloodshot eyes from their sockets burst
In the torrid agony of thirst;
But the demons that follow laugh and yell
As they breathe the native blasts of hell.
The simoon’s blast, Oh joy! is past,
And the ocean beach is reached at last!
A storm is out and the wild winds mock
The ship as she drives on a hidden rock,
And the sea-gull screams its piercing dirge
As the dead drift in on the landward surge.
No pause! but quick as thought I lave
My burning limbs in the boiling wave,
Till I reach a cliff in my watery flight
And breathless scale its dizzy height.
The ocean’s roar comes faint and weak
As I cling to the side of the slippery peak,
Watching the wrath of the fearful night
By the fitful flash of tempest’s light.
Lo! how the eyes of the demons glow
As they cleave the boiling waves below!
Yelling at me, their helpless prey
As bloodhounds yell when the stag’s at bay!
They climb! they mount! the demons all,
And the beetling cliff begins to fall—
And I wake with a groan and a smothered scream
To find it all a fever dream
MAJOR BASSETT’S CHASE.
Text—“O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!
How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight?
—Deuteronomy XXXII, 29, 30
Glenraven’s Night Riders, five hundred strong,
Had finished their riot of outrage and wrong,
They had burned Latham’s warehouse, robbed Italy’s King
(What defense in the courts will the criminals bring?
Who will dare to defend base ingratitude’s sting?);
They have scourged a Kentuckian’s back like a slave,
’Twas the brute deed of cowards, not the just or the brave,
[A]McCool on his shoulders plied an overseer’s lashes
By the light of two warehouses sinking in ashes.
They have dragged helpless maidens from innocent bed,
They have shot through the bedrooms of widows—with lead
These black-handed anarchists of murder and arson
Fired four volleys at a silver haired Methodist parson,
And yelled in derision as their shots rang on air,
“Denounce us again, Sir Priest—if you dare!
Neither for you, nor your Church, nor your God do we care!
They have done all that arson and force could achieve,
And quaking like cowards the outlaws take leave,
Unlike valiant soldiers after manly affray
But like thieves from a hen-roost sneak quickly away.
Out spoke Major Bassett: “The dogs had their day,
And shooting’s a game at which two parties can play,
They surprised us; the cowards have all skulked away.
We’ll follow!” cried Bassett, and off with his mount
Pursued—ten brave men and true were his count.
There was clatter of hoofs down the old Cadiz road,
’Twas a clean pair of heels the Glenravenites showed.
Alas, for the pluck of these minions of night,
Black of mask and of heart, but their livers are white.