The horologe of Eternity
Sayeth this incessantly,
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.
The writing of this famous ballad was suggested to Mr. Longfellow by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall-River, Massachusetts—a circumstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to it the spirit of a Norse Viking song of war and of the sea. It is written in the swift leaping meter employed by Drayton in his “Ode to the Cambro Britons on their Harp.”
PEAK! speak! thou fearful guest!
Who, with thy hollow breast