"'Tis a stern and startling thing to think,
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving:
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife,
There are daily sounds to tell us that life
Is dying, and Death is living!
"But breath and bloom set doom at nought—
How little the wretched Countess thought,
When at night she unloosed her sandal,
That the fates had woven her burial-cloth,
And that Death, in the shape of a death's head moth,
Was fluttering round her candle!
"As she looked at her clock of ormolu,
For the hours she had gone so wearily through
At the end of a day of trial,
How little she saw in the pride of prime
The dart of Death in the hand of Time—
That hand which moved the dial!
"As she went with her taper up the stair,
How little her swollen eye was aware
That the shadow which followed was double!
Or when she closed her chamber-door,
It was shutting out, and for evermore,
The world and its worldly trouble.
"Little she dreamt as she laid aside
Her jewels—after one glance of pride—
They were solemn bequests to Vanity;
Or when her robes she began to doff,
That she stood so near to the putting off
Of the flesh that clothes humanity.
"And when she quenched the taper's light,
How little she thought, as the smoke took flight,
That her day was done and merged in a night
Of dreams and duration uncertain;
Or along with her own
That a hand of bone
Was closing mortality's curtain!
* * * * *
"Thus, even thus, the Countess slept,
While death still nearer and nearer crept,
Like the Thane who smote the sleeping;
But her mind was busy with early joys,
Her golden treasures and golden toys,
That flashed a bright
And golden light
Under lids still red with weeping.
"The golden guineas in silken purse,
And the 'Golden Legends' she heard from her nurse,
Of the Mayor in his gilded carriage—
And London streets that were paved with gold,
And the golden eggs that were laid of old—
With each golden thing
To the golden ring
At her own auriferous marriage!
"And still the golden light of the sun
Through her golden dream appeared to run,
Though the night that roared without was one
To terrify seamen or gipsies—
While the moon, as if in malicious mirth,
Kept peeping down at the ruffled earth,
As though she enjoyed the tempest's birth,
In revenge of her old eclipses.