There was a vault within whose stifling maw
Lay many a scion of Amieri's race,
Crumbling to dust beneath Death's sapping thaw,
That still melts down mortality apace;
And round the fastness distillations raw
Moulder'd the stones with damp and hideous trace;
And here they laid her beautiful and pure,
From every chance of grief and pain secure.
LI.
Close in their cold and narrow coffins pent,
Around her lay ancestral ashes heaped,
That through the dank and clammy darkness sent
Currents in foul and noxious vapours steeped;
And loudly through the gloomy stillness went
The oozy plashes from the roof that dripped,
Marking the minutes as they slid away,
With slimy tokens of the frame's decay.
LII.
The rank air slumber'd deep on midnight wings,
Dead as the dead that fester'd 'neath its shade,
Hush'd from those low and fearful whisperings,
That make the living pallid and afraid,
Till nigh amid its awful shadowings,
The cerements silver'd round the hapless maid,
As might a lucent gem with radiance glow,
Caught from the brightness of the soul below.
LIII.
Soh! 'tis a sigh—low drawn and very faint,
A spirit stirring 'mid the slumb'ring dead,
Bodiless, homeless, breathing forth its plaint,
Nor yet from life and its sad memories fled.
Soh! it comes swooning through the air so taint
Acute and clear as ever arrow sped;
Ah! miserere for the hapless soul,
That from the shores of death thus wafts its dole.