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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1238 ***
+
+THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
+
+By James Thomson
+
+
+
+     Per me si va nella citta dolente.
+
+     --Dante
+
+
+     Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
+     D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
+     Girando senza posa,
+     Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;
+     Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
+     Indovinar non so.
+
+     Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
+     Ogni creata cosa,
+     In te, morte, si posa
+     Nostra ignuda natura;
+     Lieta no, ma sicura
+     Dell' antico dolor . . .
+     Pero ch' esser beato
+     Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.
+
+     --Leopardi
+
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+  Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
+    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
+  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
+    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
+  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             5
+  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
+    And wail life's discords into careless ears?
+
+  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
+    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
+  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                10
+    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
+  Because it gives some sense of power and passion
+  In helpless innocence to try to fashion
+    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
+
+  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   15
+    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
+  Or such as pasture and grow fat among
+    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
+  Or pious spirits with a God above them
+  To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      20
+    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
+
+  For none of these I write, and none of these
+    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
+  So may they flourish in their due degrees,
+    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             25
+  If any cares for the weak words here written,
+  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
+    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.
+
+  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
+    In that same city of tremendous night,                    30
+  Will understand the speech and feel a stir
+    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
+  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
+  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
+    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         35
+
+  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
+    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
+  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
+    To any who divined it not before:                         40
+  None uninitiate by many a presage
+  Will comprehend the language of the message,
+    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
+
+
+
+                                    I
+
+  The City is of Night; perchance of Death
+    But certainly of Night; for never there
+  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
+    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
+  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
+  The sun has never visited that city,
+    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
+
+  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
+    Though present in distempered gloom of thought
+  And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
+    But when a dream night after night is brought
+  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
+  Recur each year for several years, can any
+    Discern that dream from real life in aught?
+
+  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
+    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
+  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
+    The while all change and many vanish quite,
+  In their recurrence with recurrent changes
+  A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
+    We count things real; such is memory's might.
+
+  A river girds the city west and south,
+    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
+  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
+    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
+  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
+  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
+    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
+
+  Upon an easy slope it lies at large
+    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
+  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
+    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
+  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
+  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
+    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35
+
+  The city is not ruinous, although
+    Great ruins of an unremembered past,
+  With others of a few short years ago
+    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
+  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
+  In house or palace front from roof to basement
+    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
+
+  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
+    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
+  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
+    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
+  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
+  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
+    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
+
+  Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
+    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
+  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
+    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
+  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
+  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
+    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
+
+  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
+    A woman rarely, now and then a child:
+  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
+    To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
+  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
+  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
+    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
+
+  They often murmur to themselves, they speak
+    To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
+  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
+    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
+  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
+  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
+    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.                70
+
+  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
+    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
+  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
+    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain
+  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,            75
+  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
+    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
+
+  They leave all hope behind who enter there:
+    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
+  One anodyne for torture and despair;                        80
+    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
+  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
+  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
+    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave (1)
+
+       (1) Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet
+       flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang
+       ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within
+       easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it
+       will.
+
+
+
+                                    II
+
+  Because he seemed to walk with an intent
+    I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
+  Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
+    Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
+  Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet                5
+  We travelled many a long dim silent street.
+
+  At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
+    A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
+  Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
+    Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:                 10
+  He murmured to himself with dull despair,
+  Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  Then turning to the right went on once more
+    And travelled weary roads without suspense;
+  And reached at last a low wall's open door,                 15
+    Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
+  He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
+  Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
+
+  Then turning to the right resumed his march,
+    And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,    20
+  Until on stooping through a narrow arch
+    We stood before a squalid house at length:
+  He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
+  Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
+
+  When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,                 25
+    I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
+  Of desolation I had seen and heard
+    In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
+  Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
+  Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?              30
+
+  As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
+    He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
+  The signs and figures of the circling hours,
+    Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
+  The works proceed until run down; although                  35
+  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
+
+  Then turning to the right paced on again,
+    And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms
+  Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
+    And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;              40
+  And paused to murmur with the old despair,
+  Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
+    Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
+  He circled thus forever tracing out                         45
+    The series of the fraction left of Life;
+  Perpetual recurrence in the scope
+  Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. (1)
+
+                                                   LXX
+       (1) Life divided by that persistent three = --- = .210.
+                                                   333
+
+
+
+                                   III
+
+  Although lamps burn along the silent streets,
+    Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
+  The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
+    But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
+  The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,                    5
+  The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
+    The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
+
+  And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
+    The night remains for it as dark and dense,
+  Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns                    10
+    As in the daylight with its natural sense;
+  Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
+  Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
+    Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.
+
+  The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep                15
+    Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
+  Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
+    And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
+  Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
+  but all more dubious than the things of vision,             20
+    So that it knows not when it is beguiled.
+
+  No time abates the first despair and awe,
+    But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
+  Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
+    Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;                  25
+  Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
+  Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,
+    The soul is too outworn for wondering.
+
+
+
+                                    IV
+
+  He stood alone within the spacious square
+    Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
+  With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
+    As if large multitudes were gathered round:
+  A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,               5
+  The glances burning with unnatural light:--
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: All was black,
+  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
+  A brooding hush without a stir or note,                     10
+  The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
+  And thus for hours; then some enormous things
+  Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               15
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
+  Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
+  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
+  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;                    20
+  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
+  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   25
+  As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
+  That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
+  Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
+  Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
+  A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell                 30
+  For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Meteors ran                   35
+  And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
+  The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
+  The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
+  The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
+  And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:               40
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Air once more,
+  And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;                      45
+  Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
+  The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
+  White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
+  The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
+    Yet I strode on austere;                                  50
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: On the left
+  The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
+  There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,           55
+  A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;
+  Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
+  And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               60
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: From the right
+  A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
+  A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
+  Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;                   65
+  O desolation moving with such grace!
+  O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
+    I fell as on my bier,
+    Hope travailed with such fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   70
+  As I came through the desert: I was twain,
+  Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
+  One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
+  And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
+  And she came on, and never turned aside,                    75
+  Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
+    And as she came more near
+    My soul grew mad with fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Hell is mild                  80
+  And piteous matched with that accursed wild;
+  A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
+  A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;
+  That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
+  Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:              85
+    The mystery was clear;
+    Mad rage had swallowed fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: By the sea
+  She knelt and bent above that senseless me;                 90
+  Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
+  She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
+  She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
+  Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:
+    And mad with rage and fear,                               95
+    I stood stonebound so near.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: When the tide
+  Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
+  She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne        100
+  Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
+  I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
+  Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
+    They love; their doom is drear,
+    Yet they nor hope nor fear;                               105
+    But I, what do I here?
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+  How he arrives there none can clearly know;
+    Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
+  Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
+    Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
+  To reach it is as dying fever-stricken                      5
+  To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
+    And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.
+
+  But being there one feels a citizen;
+    Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
+  Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?                 10
+    And yet release does come; there comes a morn
+  When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
+  That all the world is changed for him completely,
+    And he is verily as if new-born.
+
+  He scarcely can believe the blissful change,                15
+    He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
+  Never again will he approach the range
+    Infected by that evil spell now burst:
+  Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city
+  Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,                20
+    With horror ever deepening from the first.
+
+  Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
+    A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,
+  And love them more than death or happy life,
+    They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;             25
+  Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
+  Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
+    Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.
+
+
+
+                                    VI
+
+  I sat forlornly by the river-side,
+    And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
+  Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
+    Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
+  And heard the heave and plashing of the flow                5
+  Against the wall a dozen feet below.
+
+  Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
+    And under one, a few steps from my seat,
+  I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
+    Although I had not heard approaching feet:                10
+  These bodiless voices in my waking dream
+  Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:--
+
+  And you have after all come back; come back.
+  I was about to follow on your track.
+  And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.            15
+
+  That I have failed is proved by my return:
+  The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,
+  But listen; and the story you shall learn.
+
+  I reached the portal common spirits fear,
+  And read the words above it, dark yet clear,                20
+  "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"
+
+  And would have passed in, gratified to gain
+  That positive eternity of pain
+  Instead of this insufferable inane.
+
+  A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;                    25
+  First leave your hopes behind!--But years have passed
+  Since I left all behind me, to the last:
+
+  You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
+  This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
+  How could I seek to enter void of it?                       30
+
+  He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
+  And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
+  Without the payment of the settled toll?
+
+  Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
+  Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;             35
+  Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
+
+  This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
+  And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
+  They are so thin that it will never glut.
+
+  I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;                    40
+  And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
+  And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
+
+  When one casts off a load he springs upright,
+  Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
+  And briskly paces forward strong and light:                 45
+
+  But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
+  The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
+  Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.
+
+  And as they passed me, earnestly from each
+  A morsel of his hope I did beseech,                         50
+  To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.
+
+  No one would cede a little of his store,
+  Though knowing that in instants three or four
+  He must resign the whole for evermore.
+
+  So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;                        55
+  For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
+  Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.
+
+  The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
+  With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
+  We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;                   60
+
+  And sharing it between us, entrance win,
+  In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
+  Let us without delay our search begin.
+
+
+
+                                   VII
+
+  Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
+    And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
+  And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
+    And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
+  But others think them visions of illusion,                  5
+  Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
+    No man there being wholly sane in mind.
+
+  And yet a man who raves, however mad,
+    Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
+  Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:                    10
+    The phantoms have no reticence at all:
+  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
+  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
+    The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
+
+  I have seen phantoms there that were as men                 15
+    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
+  Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
+    Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
+  The City rests for man so weird and awful,
+  That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,               20
+    And phantoms there may have their proper home.
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+  While I still lingered on that river-walk,
+    And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
+  I heard another couple join in talk,
+    And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
+  Seated against an elm bole on the ground,                   5
+  Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.
+
+  "I never knew another man on earth
+    But had some joy and solace in his life,
+    Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
+  My doom has been unmitigated dearth."                       10
+
+  "We gaze upon the river, and we note
+  The various vessels large and small that float,
+  Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."
+
+  "And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
+    Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;                   15
+    But homely love with common food and health,
+  And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."
+
+  "This all-too-humble soul would arrogate
+  Unto itself some signalising hate
+  From the supreme indifference of Fate!"                     20
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself; yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
+
+  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou               25
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,                   30
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
+  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
+  As to produce men when He might refrain!                    35
+
+  "The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
+  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
+  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
+
+  "While air of Space and Time's full river flow
+  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:                   40
+  It may be wearing out, but who can know?
+
+  "Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
+  That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
+  That it is quite indifferent to him.
+
+  "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?                45
+  It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
+  Then grinds him back into eternal death."
+
+
+
+                                    IX
+
+  It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
+    When wandering there in some deserted street,
+  The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
+    The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
+  Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?                 5
+  Who in this city of the stars abideth
+    To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?
+
+  The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
+    As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
+  The harness jingles, as it passes by;                       10
+    The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
+  A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
+  Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
+    And so it rolls into the night again.
+
+  What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?           15
+    Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
+  Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
+    Or Limbo of the scornful universe
+  The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
+  Of all things good which should have been our portions,     20
+    But have been strangled by that City's curse.
+
+
+
+                                    X
+
+  The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
+    In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
+  High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
+    The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
+  And every window of its front shed light,                   5
+  Portentous in that City of the Night.
+
+  But though thus lighted it was deadly still
+    As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;
+  Perchance a congregation to fulfil
+    Solemnities of silence in this doom,                      10
+  Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
+  Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
+
+  Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
+    Whereon lay still light from the open door;
+  The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,                    15
+    Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
+  And ample stairways rose to left and right
+  Whose balustrades were also draped with night.
+
+  I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
+    Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;               20
+  But each was hung with its funereal pall,
+    And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
+  With picture or with statue or with bust,
+  all copied from the same fair form of dust:
+
+  A woman very young and very fair;                           25
+    Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
+  And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
+    And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
+  Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
+  these shapes lit up that mausolean night.                   30
+
+  At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
+    And reached an open oratory hung
+  With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
+    Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
+  And one lay there upon a low white bed,                     35
+  With tapers burning at the foot and head:
+
+  The Lady of the images, supine,
+    Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
+  And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
+    A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:              40
+  A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
+  Surmounted the large altar left in night:--
+
+  The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
+    In every one whereof thine image dwells,
+  Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.                  45
+
+  The inmost oratory of my soul,
+  Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
+  Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
+
+  I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
+  With eyes forever fixed upon that face,                     50
+  So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
+
+  I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
+  As patient as a statue carved in stone,
+  Of adoration and eternal grief.
+
+  While thou dost not awake I cannot move;                    55
+  And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
+  And I alive feel turning into stone.
+
+  Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
+  Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
+  Dear vision better than all death or life.                  60
+
+  But I renounce all choice of life or death,
+  For either shall be ever at thy side,
+  And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.--
+
+  He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
+    Intent upon that uncorrupted face,                        65
+  Entranced except his moving lips alone:
+    I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
+  This was the festival that filled with light
+  That palace in the City of the Night.
+
+
+
+                                    XI
+
+  What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
+    And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
+  And make their habitations in the tombs,
+    And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
+  And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error            5
+  To reach that void of darkness and old terror
+    Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?
+
+  They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
+    They have much goodness yet they do not well,
+  (The fools we know have their own paradise,                 10
+    The wicked also have their proper Hell);
+  They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
+  Much patience but their time endureth longer,
+    Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.
+
+  They are most rational and yet insane:                      15
+    And outward madness not to be controlled;
+  A perfect reason in the central brain,
+    Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
+  And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
+  The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly                     20
+    To cheat itself refusing to behold.
+
+  And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
+    And some renowned for genius and for worth;
+  And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
+    And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth             25
+  Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
+  All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
+    The saddest and the weariest men on earth.
+
+
+
+                                   XII
+
+  Our isolated units could be brought
+    To act together for some common end?
+  For one by one, each silent with his thought,
+    I marked a long loose line approach and wend
+  Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,            5
+  And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
+
+  Then I would follow in among the last:
+    And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
+  Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
+    With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:        10
+  Whence come you in the world of life and light
+  To this our City of Tremendous Night?--
+
+  From pleading in a senate of rich lords
+  For some scant justice to our countless hordes
+  Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:            15
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From wandering through many a solemn scene
+  Of opium visions, with a heart serene
+  And intellect miraculously bright:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   20
+
+  From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
+  By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
+  And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,                   25
+  Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
+  Of love and adoration and delight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
+  A nation which beneath my rule has grown                    30
+  Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From preaching to an audience fired with faith
+  The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
+  Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:        35
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From drinking fiery poison in a den
+  Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
+  Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   40
+
+  From picturing with all beauty and all grace
+  First Eden and the parents of our race,
+  A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From writing a great work with patient plan                 45
+  To justify the ways of God to man,
+  And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From desperate fighting with a little band
+  Against the powerful tyrants of our land,                   50
+  To free our brethren in their own despite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
+  Each one responded with his countersign,
+  Then entered the cathedral; and in turn                     55
+  I entered also, having given mine;
+  But lingered near until I heard no more,
+  And marked the closing of the massive door.
+
+
+
+                                   XIII
+
+  Of all things human which are strange and wild
+    This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
+  And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
+    To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
+  That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating                  5
+  How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
+    How naught is constant on the earth but change.
+
+  The hours are heavy on him and the days;
+    The burden of the months he scarce can bear;
+  And often in his secret soul he prays                       10
+    To sleep through barren periods unaware,
+  Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
+  Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
+    He would outsleep another term of care.
+
+  Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make                    15
+    Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
+  This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
+    Wounded and slow and very venomous;
+  Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
+  Distilling poison at each painful motion,                   20
+    And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
+
+  And since he cannot spend and use aright
+    The little time here given him in trust,
+  But wasteth it in weary undelight
+    Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,             25
+  He naturally claimeth to inherit
+  The everlasting Future, that his merit
+    May have full scope; as surely is most just.
+
+  O length of the intolerable hours,
+    O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,                  30
+  O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
+    O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
+  Immutable for all of all our legions
+  Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
+    Not of your speed and variance WE complain.               35
+
+  WE do not ask a longer term of strife,
+    Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
+  We do not claim renewed and endless life
+    When this which is our torment here shall close,
+  An everlasting conscious inanition!                         40
+  We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
+    Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
+
+
+
+                                   XIV
+
+  Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
+    With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
+  And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
+    No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
+  No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,           5
+  And the high altar space was unillumed.
+
+  Around the pillars and against the walls
+    Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
+  Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
+    Perchance they were not a great multitude                 10
+  Save in that city of so lonely streets
+  Where one may count up every face he meets.
+
+  All patiently awaited the event
+    Without a stir or sound, as if no less
+  Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.                   15
+    And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
+  From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
+  Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
+
+  Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
+    Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;                  20
+  The head behind it of enormous size.
+    And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
+  Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
+  By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--
+
+  O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                    25
+  O battling in black floods without an ark!
+    O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
+  My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
+  With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
+    Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!        30
+
+  My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
+  Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
+    And perish in your perishing unblest.
+  And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
+  Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35
+    To find some solace for your wild unrest.
+
+  And now at last authentic word I bring,
+  Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
+    Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
+  There is no God; no Fiend with names divine                 40
+  Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
+    It is to satiate no Being's gall.
+
+  It was the dark delusion of a dream,
+  That living Person conscious and supreme,
+    Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;              45
+  Whom we must curse because the life he gave
+  Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
+    Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
+
+  This little life is all we must endure,
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                   50
+    We fall asleep and never wake again;
+  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
+  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
+    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
+
+  We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55
+  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
+    To other beings with their own time-doom:
+  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
+  Infinite aeons after the last man
+    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          60
+
+  We bow down to the universal laws,
+  Which never had for man a special clause
+    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
+  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
+  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65
+    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
+
+  All substance lives and struggles evermore
+  Through countless shapes continually at war,
+    By countless interactions interknit:
+  If one is born a certain day on earth,                      70
+  All times and forces tended to that birth,
+    Not all the world could change or hinder it.
+
+  I find no hint throughout the Universe
+  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
+    I find alone Necessity Supreme;                           75
+  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
+  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
+    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
+
+  O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:                 80
+    Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+    Without the fear of waking after death.--
+
+  The organ-like vibrations of his voice                      85
+    Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+    Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still
+  As brooding on that "End it when you will."                 90
+
+
+
+                                    XV
+
+  Wherever men are gathered, all the air
+    Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
+  Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
+  Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
+  Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,                      5
+  Are breathed into it with our respiration
+    It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
+
+  So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
+    As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
+  But nourishes warm life or hastens death                    10
+    With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
+  Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
+  Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;
+    He in his turn affecting all of  these.
+
+  That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,                   15
+    Although not many exiles wander there,
+  With many a potent evil influence,
+    Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
+  Infections of unutterable sadness,
+  Infections of incalculable madness,                         20
+    Infections of incurable despair.
+
+
+
+                                   XVI
+
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+    As musing on that message we had heard
+  And brooding on that "End it when you will;"
+    Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky                5
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:--
+
+  The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:
+    We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+    Can I find here the comfort which I crave?                10
+
+  In all eternity I had one chance,
+    One few years' term of gracious human life:
+  The splendours of the intellect's advance,
+    The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+  The social pleasures with their genial wit:                 15
+    The fascination of the worlds of art,
+  The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
+    By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+    The careless childhood and the ardent youth,              20
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+    The reverend age serene with life's long truth:
+
+  All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+    The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan              25
+    Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  This chance was never offered me before;
+    For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+  Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.                   30
+
+  And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+    A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+    So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,                  35
+    My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+    What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+    Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?        40
+  Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+    Hush and be mute envisaging despair.--
+
+  This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
+    Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,                   45
+    For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:--
+
+  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
+  This life itself holds nothing good for us,                 50
+    But ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
+    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.
+
+
+
+                                   XVII
+
+  How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
+    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
+  Their thick processions of supernal lights
+    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
+  And men regard with passionate awe and yearning             5
+  The mighty marching and the golden burning,
+    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
+
+  Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
+    Are glorified from vision as they pass
+  The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;          10
+    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
+  To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
+  Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
+    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.
+
+  With such a living light these dead eyes shine,             15
+    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
+  We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
+    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
+  Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;
+  There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,           20
+    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
+
+  If we could near them with the flight unflown,
+    We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
+  Or suns all self-consuming like our own
+    Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:                  25
+  They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
+  The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
+    The empyrean is a void abyss.
+
+
+
+                                  XVIII
+
+  I wandered in a suburb of the north,
+    And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
+  Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
+    Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
+  The air above was wan with misty light,                     5
+  The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.
+
+  I took the left-hand path and slowly trod
+    Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
+  The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
+    With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,                10
+  With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
+  So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.
+
+  After a hundred steps I grew aware
+    Of something crawling in the lane below;
+  It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there                15
+    That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
+  The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
+  To drag; for it would die in its own den.
+
+  But coming level with it I discerned
+    That it had been a man; for at my tread                   20
+  It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
+    Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
+  And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
+  Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.
+
+  A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,                  25
+    An infamy for manhood to behold.
+  He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
+    You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
+  And all that men go mad upon, since you
+  Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?                   30
+
+  You think that I am weak and must submit
+    Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
+  And you are dead as if I clove with it
+    That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!
+  I fling this phial if you seek to pass,                     35
+  And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.
+
+  And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!
+    Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.
+  If you could find, it would avail you naught;
+    Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:                40
+  For who of mortal or immortal race
+  The lifetrack of another can retrace?
+
+  Did you but know my agony and toil!
+    Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
+  My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;          45
+    Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
+  My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
+  I cannot move but with continual moan.
+
+  But I am in the very way at last
+    To find the long-lost broken golden thread                50
+  Which unites my present with my past,
+    If you but go your own way.  And I said,
+  I will retire as soon as you have told
+  Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.
+
+  And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;              55
+    I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back
+  From this accursed night without a morn,
+    And through the deserts which have else no track,
+  And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
+  To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:                          60
+
+  And I become a nursling soft and pure,
+    An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
+  Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
+    Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
+  Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,            65
+  And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.
+
+  He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
+    Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
+  And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
+    He should to antenatal night retrace,                     70
+  And hide his elements in that large womb
+  Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
+
+  And even thus, what weary way were planned,
+    To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
+  Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!              75
+    For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
+  What never has been, yet may have its when;
+  The thing which has been, never is again.
+
+
+
+                                   XIX
+
+  The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
+    With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
+  Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
+    Is named the River of the Suicides;
+  For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,              5
+  And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
+    Within its cold secure oblivion hides.
+
+  One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
+    As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
+  Another wades in slow with purpose set                      10
+    Until the waters are above him furled;
+  Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
+  Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
+    To starve or sink from out the desert world.
+
+  They perish from their suffering surely thus,               15
+    For none beholding them attempts to save,
+  The while thinks how soon, solicitous,
+    He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
+  Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
+  Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance                 20
+    Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.
+
+  When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
+    Why actors and spectators do we stay?--
+  To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;
+    To see what shifts are yet in the dull play               25
+  For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
+  Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
+    But those asleep at home, how blest are they!
+
+  Yet it is but for one night after all:
+    What matters one brief night of dreary pain?              30
+  When after it the weary eyelids fall
+    Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
+  And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
+  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
+    That one best sleep which never wakes again.              35
+
+
+
+                                    XX
+
+  I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
+    And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
+  O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
+    A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
+  The great cathedral's western front stood there,            5
+  A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.
+
+  Before it, opposite my place of rest,
+    Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
+  A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
+    An angel standing in the moonlight clear;                 10
+  So mighty by magnificence of form,
+  They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.
+
+  Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword
+    The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
+  His vigilant intense regard was poured                      15
+    Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
+  Whose front was set at level gaze which took
+  No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.
+
+  And as I pondered these opposed shapes
+    My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon                20
+  Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
+    The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon
+  A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
+  And from the evil lethargy I woke.
+
+  The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,               25
+    And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
+  A warrior leaning on his sword alone
+    Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
+  The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
+  Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.                        30
+
+  Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
+    Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
+  The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
+    An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
+  Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept                35
+  Such mien as if open eyes it slept.
+
+  My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
+    A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
+  The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
+    And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head          40
+  Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
+  Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.
+
+  The moon had circled westward full and bright,
+    And made the temple-front a mystic dream,
+  And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,              45
+    The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
+  I pondered long that cold majestic face
+  Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.
+
+
+
+                                   XXI
+
+  Anear the centre of that northern crest
+    Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
+  From which the city east and south and west
+    Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
+  An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,                      5
+  The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,
+    Upon a graded granite base foursquare.
+
+  Low-seated she leans forward massively,
+    With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
+  Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;                       10
+    Across a clasped book in her lap the right
+  Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
+  With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
+    Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.
+
+  Words cannot picture her; but all men know                  15
+    That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
+  Three centuries and threescore years ago,
+    With phantasies of his peculiar thought:
+  The instruments of carpentry and science
+  Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance               20
+    With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;
+
+  Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
+    The grave and solid infant perched beside,
+  With open winglets that might bear a dove,
+    Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;                      25
+  Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
+  But all too impotent to lift the regal
+    Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;
+
+  And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
+    To mock her grand head and the knotted frown              30
+  Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
+    The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
+  Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
+  As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
+    The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;           35
+
+  The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
+    The massy rainbow curved in front of it
+  Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
+    The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,
+  Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions                   40
+  Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
+    The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.
+
+  Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
+    Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
+  Her fate heroic and calamitous;                             45
+    Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
+  Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
+  Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
+    Of the day setting on her baffled prime.
+
+  Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 50
+    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
+  Sustained by her indomitable will:
+    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
+  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
+  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre           55
+    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
+
+  But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
+    With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
+  A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
+    More desperate than strife with hope debarred,            60
+  More fatal than the adamantine Never
+  Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
+    Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
+
+  To sense that every struggle brings defeat
+    Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;             65
+  That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
+    Because they have no secret to express;
+  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
+  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
+    That all is vanity and nothingness.                       70
+
+  Titanic from her high throne in the north,
+    That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
+  In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
+    Over her Capital of teen and threne,
+  Over the river with its isles and bridges,                  75
+  The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,
+    Confronting them with a coeval mien.
+
+  The moving moon and stars from east to west
+    Circle before her in the sea of air;
+  Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.             80
+    Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
+  The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
+  The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
+    And confirmation of the old despair.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1238 ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1238 ***</div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By James Thomson
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             Per me si va nella citta dolente.
+
+             &mdash;Dante
+        </pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
+             D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
+             Girando senza posa,
+             Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;
+             Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
+             Indovinar non so.
+
+             Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
+             Ogni creata cosa,
+             In te, morte, si posa
+             Nostra ignuda natura;
+             Lieta no, ma sicura
+             Dell' antico dolor . . .
+             Pero ch' esser beato
+             Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.
+
+             &mdash;Leopardi
+        </pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      PROEM
+    </h1>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
+    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
+  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
+    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
+  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             5
+  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
+    And wail life's discords into careless ears?
+
+  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
+    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
+  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                10
+    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
+  Because it gives some sense of power and passion
+  In helpless innocence to try to fashion
+    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
+
+  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   15
+    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
+  Or such as pasture and grow fat among
+    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
+  Or pious spirits with a God above them
+  To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      20
+    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
+
+  For none of these I write, and none of these
+    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
+  So may they flourish in their due degrees,
+    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             25
+  If any cares for the weak words here written,
+  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
+    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.
+
+  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
+    In that same city of tremendous night,                    30
+  Will understand the speech and feel a stir
+    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
+  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
+  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
+    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         35
+
+  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
+    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
+  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
+    To any who divined it not before:                         40
+  None uninitiate by many a presage
+  Will comprehend the language of the message,
+    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    I
+
+  The City is of Night; perchance of Death
+    But certainly of Night; for never there
+  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
+    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
+  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
+  The sun has never visited that city,
+    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
+
+  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
+    Though present in distempered gloom of thought
+  And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
+    But when a dream night after night is brought
+  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
+  Recur each year for several years, can any
+    Discern that dream from real life in aught?
+
+  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
+    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
+  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
+    The while all change and many vanish quite,
+  In their recurrence with recurrent changes
+  A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
+    We count things real; such is memory's might.
+
+  A river girds the city west and south,
+    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
+  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
+    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
+  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
+  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
+    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
+
+  Upon an easy slope it lies at large
+    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
+  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
+    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
+  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
+  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
+    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35
+
+  The city is not ruinous, although
+    Great ruins of an unremembered past,
+  With others of a few short years ago
+    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
+  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
+  In house or palace front from roof to basement
+    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
+
+  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
+    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
+  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
+    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
+  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
+  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
+    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
+
+  Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
+    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
+  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
+    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
+  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
+  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
+    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
+
+  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
+    A woman rarely, now and then a child:
+  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
+    To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
+  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
+  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
+    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
+
+  They often murmur to themselves, they speak
+    To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
+  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
+    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
+  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
+  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
+    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.                70
+
+  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
+    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
+  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
+    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain
+  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,            75
+  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
+    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
+
+  They leave all hope behind who enter there:
+    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
+  One anodyne for torture and despair;                        80
+    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
+  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
+  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
+    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave (1)
+
+       (1) Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet
+       flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang
+       ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within
+       easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it
+       will.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    II
+
+  Because he seemed to walk with an intent
+    I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
+  Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
+    Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
+  Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet                5
+  We travelled many a long dim silent street.
+
+  At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
+    A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
+  Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
+    Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:                 10
+  He murmured to himself with dull despair,
+  Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  Then turning to the right went on once more
+    And travelled weary roads without suspense;
+  And reached at last a low wall's open door,                 15
+    Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
+  He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
+  Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
+
+  Then turning to the right resumed his march,
+    And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,    20
+  Until on stooping through a narrow arch
+    We stood before a squalid house at length:
+  He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
+  Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
+
+  When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,                 25
+    I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
+  Of desolation I had seen and heard
+    In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
+  Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
+  Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?              30
+
+  As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
+    He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
+  The signs and figures of the circling hours,
+    Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
+  The works proceed until run down; although                  35
+  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
+
+  Then turning to the right paced on again,
+    And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms
+  Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
+    And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;              40
+  And paused to murmur with the old despair,
+  Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
+    Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
+  He circled thus forever tracing out                         45
+    The series of the fraction left of Life;
+  Perpetual recurrence in the scope
+  Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. (1)
+
+                                                   LXX
+       (1) Life divided by that persistent three = &mdash;- = .210.
+                                                   333
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   III
+
+  Although lamps burn along the silent streets,
+    Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
+  The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
+    But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
+  The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,                    5
+  The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
+    The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
+
+  And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
+    The night remains for it as dark and dense,
+  Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns                    10
+    As in the daylight with its natural sense;
+  Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
+  Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
+    Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.
+
+  The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep                15
+    Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
+  Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
+    And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
+  Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
+  but all more dubious than the things of vision,             20
+    So that it knows not when it is beguiled.
+
+  No time abates the first despair and awe,
+    But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
+  Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
+    Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;                  25
+  Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
+  Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,
+    The soul is too outworn for wondering.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    IV
+
+  He stood alone within the spacious square
+    Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
+  With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
+    As if large multitudes were gathered round:
+  A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,               5
+  The glances burning with unnatural light:&mdash;
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: All was black,
+  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
+  A brooding hush without a stir or note,                     10
+  The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
+  And thus for hours; then some enormous things
+  Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               15
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
+  Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
+  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
+  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;                    20
+  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
+  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   25
+  As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
+  That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
+  Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
+  Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
+  A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell                 30
+  For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Meteors ran                   35
+  And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
+  The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
+  The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
+  The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
+  And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:               40
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Air once more,
+  And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;                      45
+  Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
+  The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
+  White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
+  The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
+    Yet I strode on austere;                                  50
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: On the left
+  The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
+  There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,           55
+  A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;
+  Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
+  And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               60
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: From the right
+  A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
+  A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
+  Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;                   65
+  O desolation moving with such grace!
+  O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
+    I fell as on my bier,
+    Hope travailed with such fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   70
+  As I came through the desert: I was twain,
+  Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
+  One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
+  And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
+  And she came on, and never turned aside,                    75
+  Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
+    And as she came more near
+    My soul grew mad with fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Hell is mild                  80
+  And piteous matched with that accursed wild;
+  A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
+  A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;
+  That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
+  Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:              85
+    The mystery was clear;
+    Mad rage had swallowed fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: By the sea
+  She knelt and bent above that senseless me;                 90
+  Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
+  She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
+  She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
+  Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:
+    And mad with rage and fear,                               95
+    I stood stonebound so near.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: When the tide
+  Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
+  She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne        100
+  Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
+  I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
+  Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
+    They love; their doom is drear,
+    Yet they nor hope nor fear;                               105
+    But I, what do I here?
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    V
+
+  How he arrives there none can clearly know;
+    Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
+  Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
+    Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
+  To reach it is as dying fever-stricken                      5
+  To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
+    And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.
+
+  But being there one feels a citizen;
+    Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
+  Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?                 10
+    And yet release does come; there comes a morn
+  When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
+  That all the world is changed for him completely,
+    And he is verily as if new-born.
+
+  He scarcely can believe the blissful change,                15
+    He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
+  Never again will he approach the range
+    Infected by that evil spell now burst:
+  Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city
+  Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,                20
+    With horror ever deepening from the first.
+
+  Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
+    A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,
+  And love them more than death or happy life,
+    They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;             25
+  Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
+  Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
+    Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    VI
+
+  I sat forlornly by the river-side,
+    And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
+  Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
+    Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
+  And heard the heave and plashing of the flow                5
+  Against the wall a dozen feet below.
+
+  Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
+    And under one, a few steps from my seat,
+  I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
+    Although I had not heard approaching feet:                10
+  These bodiless voices in my waking dream
+  Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:&mdash;
+
+  And you have after all come back; come back.
+  I was about to follow on your track.
+  And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.            15
+
+  That I have failed is proved by my return:
+  The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,
+  But listen; and the story you shall learn.
+
+  I reached the portal common spirits fear,
+  And read the words above it, dark yet clear,                20
+  "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"
+
+  And would have passed in, gratified to gain
+  That positive eternity of pain
+  Instead of this insufferable inane.
+
+  A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;                    25
+  First leave your hopes behind!&mdash;But years have passed
+  Since I left all behind me, to the last:
+
+  You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
+  This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
+  How could I seek to enter void of it?                       30
+
+  He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
+  And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
+  Without the payment of the settled toll?
+
+  Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
+  Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;             35
+  Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
+
+  This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
+  And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
+  They are so thin that it will never glut.
+
+  I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;                    40
+  And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
+  And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
+
+  When one casts off a load he springs upright,
+  Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
+  And briskly paces forward strong and light:                 45
+
+  But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
+  The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
+  Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.
+
+  And as they passed me, earnestly from each
+  A morsel of his hope I did beseech,                         50
+  To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.
+
+  No one would cede a little of his store,
+  Though knowing that in instants three or four
+  He must resign the whole for evermore.
+
+  So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;                        55
+  For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
+  Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.
+
+  The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
+  With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
+  We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;                   60
+
+  And sharing it between us, entrance win,
+  In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
+  Let us without delay our search begin.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   VII
+
+  Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
+    And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
+  And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
+    And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
+  But others think them visions of illusion,                  5
+  Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
+    No man there being wholly sane in mind.
+
+  And yet a man who raves, however mad,
+    Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
+  Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:                    10
+    The phantoms have no reticence at all:
+  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
+  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
+    The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
+
+  I have seen phantoms there that were as men                 15
+    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
+  Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
+    Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
+  The City rests for man so weird and awful,
+  That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,               20
+    And phantoms there may have their proper home.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   VIII
+
+  While I still lingered on that river-walk,
+    And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
+  I heard another couple join in talk,
+    And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
+  Seated against an elm bole on the ground,                   5
+  Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.
+
+  "I never knew another man on earth
+    But had some joy and solace in his life,
+    Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
+  My doom has been unmitigated dearth."                       10
+
+  "We gaze upon the river, and we note
+  The various vessels large and small that float,
+  Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."
+
+  "And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
+    Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;                   15
+    But homely love with common food and health,
+  And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."
+
+  "This all-too-humble soul would arrogate
+  Unto itself some signalising hate
+  From the supreme indifference of Fate!"                     20
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself; yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
+
+  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou               25
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,                   30
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
+  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
+  As to produce men when He might refrain!                    35
+
+  "The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
+  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
+  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
+
+  "While air of Space and Time's full river flow
+  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:                   40
+  It may be wearing out, but who can know?
+
+  "Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
+  That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
+  That it is quite indifferent to him.
+
+  "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?                45
+  It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
+  Then grinds him back into eternal death."
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    IX
+
+  It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
+    When wandering there in some deserted street,
+  The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
+    The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
+  Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?                 5
+  Who in this city of the stars abideth
+    To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?
+
+  The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
+    As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
+  The harness jingles, as it passes by;                       10
+    The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
+  A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
+  Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
+    And so it rolls into the night again.
+
+  What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?           15
+    Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
+  Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
+    Or Limbo of the scornful universe
+  The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
+  Of all things good which should have been our portions,     20
+    But have been strangled by that City's curse.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    X
+
+  The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
+    In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
+  High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
+    The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
+  And every window of its front shed light,                   5
+  Portentous in that City of the Night.
+
+  But though thus lighted it was deadly still
+    As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;
+  Perchance a congregation to fulfil
+    Solemnities of silence in this doom,                      10
+  Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
+  Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
+
+  Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
+    Whereon lay still light from the open door;
+  The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,                    15
+    Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
+  And ample stairways rose to left and right
+  Whose balustrades were also draped with night.
+
+  I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
+    Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;               20
+  But each was hung with its funereal pall,
+    And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
+  With picture or with statue or with bust,
+  all copied from the same fair form of dust:
+
+  A woman very young and very fair;                           25
+    Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
+  And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
+    And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
+  Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
+  these shapes lit up that mausolean night.                   30
+
+  At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
+    And reached an open oratory hung
+  With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
+    Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
+  And one lay there upon a low white bed,                     35
+  With tapers burning at the foot and head:
+
+  The Lady of the images, supine,
+    Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
+  And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
+    A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:              40
+  A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
+  Surmounted the large altar left in night:&mdash;
+
+  The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
+    In every one whereof thine image dwells,
+  Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.                  45
+
+  The inmost oratory of my soul,
+  Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
+  Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
+
+  I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
+  With eyes forever fixed upon that face,                     50
+  So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
+
+  I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
+  As patient as a statue carved in stone,
+  Of adoration and eternal grief.
+
+  While thou dost not awake I cannot move;                    55
+  And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
+  And I alive feel turning into stone.
+
+  Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
+  Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
+  Dear vision better than all death or life.                  60
+
+  But I renounce all choice of life or death,
+  For either shall be ever at thy side,
+  And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.&mdash;
+
+  He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
+    Intent upon that uncorrupted face,                        65
+  Entranced except his moving lips alone:
+    I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
+  This was the festival that filled with light
+  That palace in the City of the Night.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XI
+
+  What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
+    And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
+  And make their habitations in the tombs,
+    And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
+  And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error            5
+  To reach that void of darkness and old terror
+    Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?
+
+  They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
+    They have much goodness yet they do not well,
+  (The fools we know have their own paradise,                 10
+    The wicked also have their proper Hell);
+  They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
+  Much patience but their time endureth longer,
+    Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.
+
+  They are most rational and yet insane:                      15
+    And outward madness not to be controlled;
+  A perfect reason in the central brain,
+    Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
+  And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
+  The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly                     20
+    To cheat itself refusing to behold.
+
+  And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
+    And some renowned for genius and for worth;
+  And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
+    And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth             25
+  Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
+  All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
+    The saddest and the weariest men on earth.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XII
+
+  Our isolated units could be brought
+    To act together for some common end?
+  For one by one, each silent with his thought,
+    I marked a long loose line approach and wend
+  Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,            5
+  And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
+
+  Then I would follow in among the last:
+    And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
+  Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
+    With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:        10
+  Whence come you in the world of life and light
+  To this our City of Tremendous Night?&mdash;
+
+  From pleading in a senate of rich lords
+  For some scant justice to our countless hordes
+  Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:            15
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From wandering through many a solemn scene
+  Of opium visions, with a heart serene
+  And intellect miraculously bright:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   20
+
+  From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
+  By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
+  And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,                   25
+  Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
+  Of love and adoration and delight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
+  A nation which beneath my rule has grown                    30
+  Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From preaching to an audience fired with faith
+  The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
+  Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:        35
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From drinking fiery poison in a den
+  Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
+  Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   40
+
+  From picturing with all beauty and all grace
+  First Eden and the parents of our race,
+  A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From writing a great work with patient plan                 45
+  To justify the ways of God to man,
+  And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From desperate fighting with a little band
+  Against the powerful tyrants of our land,                   50
+  To free our brethren in their own despite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
+  Each one responded with his countersign,
+  Then entered the cathedral; and in turn                     55
+  I entered also, having given mine;
+  But lingered near until I heard no more,
+  And marked the closing of the massive door.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIII
+
+  Of all things human which are strange and wild
+    This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
+  And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
+    To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
+  That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating                  5
+  How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
+    How naught is constant on the earth but change.
+
+  The hours are heavy on him and the days;
+    The burden of the months he scarce can bear;
+  And often in his secret soul he prays                       10
+    To sleep through barren periods unaware,
+  Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
+  Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
+    He would outsleep another term of care.
+
+  Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make                    15
+    Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
+  This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
+    Wounded and slow and very venomous;
+  Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
+  Distilling poison at each painful motion,                   20
+    And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
+
+  And since he cannot spend and use aright
+    The little time here given him in trust,
+  But wasteth it in weary undelight
+    Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,             25
+  He naturally claimeth to inherit
+  The everlasting Future, that his merit
+    May have full scope; as surely is most just.
+
+  O length of the intolerable hours,
+    O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,                  30
+  O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
+    O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
+  Immutable for all of all our legions
+  Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
+    Not of your speed and variance WE complain.               35
+
+  WE do not ask a longer term of strife,
+    Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
+  We do not claim renewed and endless life
+    When this which is our torment here shall close,
+  An everlasting conscious inanition!                         40
+  We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
+    Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIV
+
+  Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
+    With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
+  And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
+    No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
+  No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,           5
+  And the high altar space was unillumed.
+
+  Around the pillars and against the walls
+    Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
+  Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
+    Perchance they were not a great multitude                 10
+  Save in that city of so lonely streets
+  Where one may count up every face he meets.
+
+  All patiently awaited the event
+    Without a stir or sound, as if no less
+  Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.                   15
+    And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
+  From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
+  Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
+
+  Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
+    Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;                  20
+  The head behind it of enormous size.
+    And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
+  Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
+  By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:&mdash;
+
+  O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                    25
+  O battling in black floods without an ark!
+    O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
+  My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
+  With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
+    Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!        30
+
+  My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
+  Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
+    And perish in your perishing unblest.
+  And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
+  Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35
+    To find some solace for your wild unrest.
+
+  And now at last authentic word I bring,
+  Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
+    Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
+  There is no God; no Fiend with names divine                 40
+  Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
+    It is to satiate no Being's gall.
+
+  It was the dark delusion of a dream,
+  That living Person conscious and supreme,
+    Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;              45
+  Whom we must curse because the life he gave
+  Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
+    Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
+
+  This little life is all we must endure,
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                   50
+    We fall asleep and never wake again;
+  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
+  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
+    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
+
+  We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55
+  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
+    To other beings with their own time-doom:
+  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
+  Infinite aeons after the last man
+    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          60
+
+  We bow down to the universal laws,
+  Which never had for man a special clause
+    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
+  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
+  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65
+    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
+
+  All substance lives and struggles evermore
+  Through countless shapes continually at war,
+    By countless interactions interknit:
+  If one is born a certain day on earth,                      70
+  All times and forces tended to that birth,
+    Not all the world could change or hinder it.
+
+  I find no hint throughout the Universe
+  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
+    I find alone Necessity Supreme;                           75
+  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
+  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
+    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
+
+  O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:                 80
+    Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+    Without the fear of waking after death.&mdash;
+
+  The organ-like vibrations of his voice                      85
+    Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+    Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still
+  As brooding on that "End it when you will."                 90
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XV
+
+  Wherever men are gathered, all the air
+    Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
+  Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
+  Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
+  Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,                      5
+  Are breathed into it with our respiration
+    It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
+
+  So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
+    As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
+  But nourishes warm life or hastens death                    10
+    With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
+  Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
+  Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;
+    He in his turn affecting all of  these.
+
+  That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,                   15
+    Although not many exiles wander there,
+  With many a potent evil influence,
+    Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
+  Infections of unutterable sadness,
+  Infections of incalculable madness,                         20
+    Infections of incurable despair.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XVI
+
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+    As musing on that message we had heard
+  And brooding on that "End it when you will;"
+    Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky                5
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:&mdash;
+
+  The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:
+    We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+    Can I find here the comfort which I crave?                10
+
+  In all eternity I had one chance,
+    One few years' term of gracious human life:
+  The splendours of the intellect's advance,
+    The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+  The social pleasures with their genial wit:                 15
+    The fascination of the worlds of art,
+  The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
+    By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+    The careless childhood and the ardent youth,              20
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+    The reverend age serene with life's long truth:
+
+  All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+    The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan              25
+    Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  This chance was never offered me before;
+    For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+  Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.                   30
+
+  And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+    A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+    So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,                  35
+    My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+    What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+    Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?        40
+  Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+    Hush and be mute envisaging despair.&mdash;
+
+  This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
+    Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,                   45
+    For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:&mdash;
+
+  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
+  This life itself holds nothing good for us,                 50
+    But ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
+    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XVII
+
+  How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
+    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
+  Their thick processions of supernal lights
+    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
+  And men regard with passionate awe and yearning             5
+  The mighty marching and the golden burning,
+    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
+
+  Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
+    Are glorified from vision as they pass
+  The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;          10
+    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
+  To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
+  Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
+    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.
+
+  With such a living light these dead eyes shine,             15
+    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
+  We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
+    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
+  Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;
+  There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,           20
+    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
+
+  If we could near them with the flight unflown,
+    We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
+  Or suns all self-consuming like our own
+    Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:                  25
+  They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
+  The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
+    The empyrean is a void abyss.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                  XVIII
+
+  I wandered in a suburb of the north,
+    And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
+  Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
+    Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
+  The air above was wan with misty light,                     5
+  The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.
+
+  I took the left-hand path and slowly trod
+    Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
+  The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
+    With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,                10
+  With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
+  So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.
+
+  After a hundred steps I grew aware
+    Of something crawling in the lane below;
+  It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there                15
+    That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
+  The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
+  To drag; for it would die in its own den.
+
+  But coming level with it I discerned
+    That it had been a man; for at my tread                   20
+  It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
+    Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
+  And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
+  Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.
+
+  A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,                  25
+    An infamy for manhood to behold.
+  He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
+    You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
+  And all that men go mad upon, since you
+  Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?                   30
+
+  You think that I am weak and must submit
+    Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
+  And you are dead as if I clove with it
+    That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!
+  I fling this phial if you seek to pass,                     35
+  And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.
+
+  And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!
+    Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.
+  If you could find, it would avail you naught;
+    Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:                40
+  For who of mortal or immortal race
+  The lifetrack of another can retrace?
+
+  Did you but know my agony and toil!
+    Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
+  My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;          45
+    Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
+  My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
+  I cannot move but with continual moan.
+
+  But I am in the very way at last
+    To find the long-lost broken golden thread                50
+  Which unites my present with my past,
+    If you but go your own way.  And I said,
+  I will retire as soon as you have told
+  Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.
+
+  And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;              55
+    I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back
+  From this accursed night without a morn,
+    And through the deserts which have else no track,
+  And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
+  To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:                          60
+
+  And I become a nursling soft and pure,
+    An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
+  Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
+    Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
+  Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,            65
+  And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.
+
+  He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
+    Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
+  And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
+    He should to antenatal night retrace,                     70
+  And hide his elements in that large womb
+  Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
+
+  And even thus, what weary way were planned,
+    To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
+  Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!              75
+    For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
+  What never has been, yet may have its when;
+  The thing which has been, never is again.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIX
+
+  The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
+    With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
+  Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
+    Is named the River of the Suicides;
+  For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,              5
+  And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
+    Within its cold secure oblivion hides.
+
+  One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
+    As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
+  Another wades in slow with purpose set                      10
+    Until the waters are above him furled;
+  Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
+  Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
+    To starve or sink from out the desert world.
+
+  They perish from their suffering surely thus,               15
+    For none beholding them attempts to save,
+  The while thinks how soon, solicitous,
+    He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
+  Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
+  Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance                 20
+    Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.
+
+  When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
+    Why actors and spectators do we stay?&mdash;
+  To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;
+    To see what shifts are yet in the dull play               25
+  For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
+  Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
+    But those asleep at home, how blest are they!
+
+  Yet it is but for one night after all:
+    What matters one brief night of dreary pain?              30
+  When after it the weary eyelids fall
+    Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
+  And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
+  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
+    That one best sleep which never wakes again.              35
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XX
+
+  I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
+    And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
+  O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
+    A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
+  The great cathedral's western front stood there,            5
+  A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.
+
+  Before it, opposite my place of rest,
+    Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
+  A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
+    An angel standing in the moonlight clear;                 10
+  So mighty by magnificence of form,
+  They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.
+
+  Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword
+    The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
+  His vigilant intense regard was poured                      15
+    Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
+  Whose front was set at level gaze which took
+  No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.
+
+  And as I pondered these opposed shapes
+    My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon                20
+  Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
+    The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon
+  A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
+  And from the evil lethargy I woke.
+
+  The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,               25
+    And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
+  A warrior leaning on his sword alone
+    Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
+  The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
+  Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.                        30
+
+  Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
+    Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
+  The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
+    An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
+  Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept                35
+  Such mien as if open eyes it slept.
+
+  My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
+    A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
+  The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
+    And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head          40
+  Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
+  Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.
+
+  The moon had circled westward full and bright,
+    And made the temple-front a mystic dream,
+  And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,              45
+    The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
+  I pondered long that cold majestic face
+  Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XXI
+
+  Anear the centre of that northern crest
+    Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
+  From which the city east and south and west
+    Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
+  An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,                      5
+  The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,
+    Upon a graded granite base foursquare.
+
+  Low-seated she leans forward massively,
+    With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
+  Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;                       10
+    Across a clasped book in her lap the right
+  Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
+  With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
+    Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.
+
+  Words cannot picture her; but all men know                  15
+    That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
+  Three centuries and threescore years ago,
+    With phantasies of his peculiar thought:
+  The instruments of carpentry and science
+  Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance               20
+    With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;
+
+  Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
+    The grave and solid infant perched beside,
+  With open winglets that might bear a dove,
+    Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;                      25
+  Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
+  But all too impotent to lift the regal
+    Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;
+
+  And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
+    To mock her grand head and the knotted frown              30
+  Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
+    The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
+  Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
+  As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
+    The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;           35
+
+  The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
+    The massy rainbow curved in front of it
+  Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
+    The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,
+  Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions                   40
+  Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
+    The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.
+
+  Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
+    Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
+  Her fate heroic and calamitous;                             45
+    Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
+  Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
+  Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
+    Of the day setting on her baffled prime.
+
+  Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 50
+    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
+  Sustained by her indomitable will:
+    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
+  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
+  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre           55
+    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
+
+  But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
+    With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
+  A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
+    More desperate than strife with hope debarred,            60
+  More fatal than the adamantine Never
+  Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
+    Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
+
+  To sense that every struggle brings defeat
+    Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;             65
+  That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
+    Because they have no secret to express;
+  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
+  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
+    That all is vanity and nothingness.                       70
+
+  Titanic from her high throne in the north,
+    That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
+  In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
+    Over her Capital of teen and threne,
+  Over the river with its isles and bridges,                  75
+  The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,
+    Confronting them with a coeval mien.
+
+  The moving moon and stars from east to west
+    Circle before her in the sea of air;
+  Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.             80
+    Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
+  The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
+  The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
+    And confirmation of the old despair.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1238 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1238 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1238)
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
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+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+    
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The City of Dreadful Night
+
+Author: James Thomson
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2008 [EBook #1238]
+Last Updated: February 7, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael C. Browning, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By James Thomson
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             Per me si va nella citta dolente.
+
+             &mdash;Dante
+        </pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
+             D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
+             Girando senza posa,
+             Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;
+             Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
+             Indovinar non so.
+
+             Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
+             Ogni creata cosa,
+             In te, morte, si posa
+             Nostra ignuda natura;
+             Lieta no, ma sicura
+             Dell' antico dolor . . .
+             Pero ch' esser beato
+             Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.
+
+             &mdash;Leopardi
+        </pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      PROEM
+    </h1>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
+    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
+  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
+    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
+  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             5
+  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
+    And wail life's discords into careless ears?
+
+  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
+    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
+  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                10
+    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
+  Because it gives some sense of power and passion
+  In helpless innocence to try to fashion
+    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
+
+  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   15
+    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
+  Or such as pasture and grow fat among
+    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
+  Or pious spirits with a God above them
+  To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      20
+    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
+
+  For none of these I write, and none of these
+    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
+  So may they flourish in their due degrees,
+    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             25
+  If any cares for the weak words here written,
+  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
+    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.
+
+  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
+    In that same city of tremendous night,                    30
+  Will understand the speech and feel a stir
+    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
+  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
+  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
+    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         35
+
+  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
+    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
+  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
+    To any who divined it not before:                         40
+  None uninitiate by many a presage
+  Will comprehend the language of the message,
+    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    I
+
+  The City is of Night; perchance of Death
+    But certainly of Night; for never there
+  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
+    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
+  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
+  The sun has never visited that city,
+    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
+
+  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
+    Though present in distempered gloom of thought
+  And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
+    But when a dream night after night is brought
+  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
+  Recur each year for several years, can any
+    Discern that dream from real life in aught?
+
+  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
+    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
+  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
+    The while all change and many vanish quite,
+  In their recurrence with recurrent changes
+  A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
+    We count things real; such is memory's might.
+
+  A river girds the city west and south,
+    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
+  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
+    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
+  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
+  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
+    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
+
+  Upon an easy slope it lies at large
+    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
+  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
+    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
+  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
+  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
+    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35
+
+  The city is not ruinous, although
+    Great ruins of an unremembered past,
+  With others of a few short years ago
+    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
+  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
+  In house or palace front from roof to basement
+    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
+
+  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
+    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
+  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
+    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
+  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
+  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
+    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
+
+  Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
+    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
+  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
+    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
+  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
+  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
+    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
+
+  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
+    A woman rarely, now and then a child:
+  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
+    To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
+  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
+  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
+    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
+
+  They often murmur to themselves, they speak
+    To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
+  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
+    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
+  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
+  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
+    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.                70
+
+  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
+    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
+  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
+    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain
+  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,            75
+  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
+    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
+
+  They leave all hope behind who enter there:
+    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
+  One anodyne for torture and despair;                        80
+    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
+  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
+  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
+    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave (1)
+
+       (1) Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet
+       flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang
+       ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within
+       easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it
+       will.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    II
+
+  Because he seemed to walk with an intent
+    I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
+  Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
+    Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
+  Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet                5
+  We travelled many a long dim silent street.
+
+  At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
+    A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
+  Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
+    Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:                 10
+  He murmured to himself with dull despair,
+  Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  Then turning to the right went on once more
+    And travelled weary roads without suspense;
+  And reached at last a low wall's open door,                 15
+    Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
+  He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
+  Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
+
+  Then turning to the right resumed his march,
+    And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,    20
+  Until on stooping through a narrow arch
+    We stood before a squalid house at length:
+  He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
+  Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
+
+  When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,                 25
+    I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
+  Of desolation I had seen and heard
+    In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
+  Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
+  Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?              30
+
+  As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
+    He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
+  The signs and figures of the circling hours,
+    Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
+  The works proceed until run down; although                  35
+  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
+
+  Then turning to the right paced on again,
+    And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms
+  Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
+    And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;              40
+  And paused to murmur with the old despair,
+  Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
+    Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
+  He circled thus forever tracing out                         45
+    The series of the fraction left of Life;
+  Perpetual recurrence in the scope
+  Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. (1)
+
+                                                   LXX
+       (1) Life divided by that persistent three = &mdash;- = .210.
+                                                   333
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   III
+
+  Although lamps burn along the silent streets,
+    Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
+  The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
+    But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
+  The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,                    5
+  The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
+    The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
+
+  And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
+    The night remains for it as dark and dense,
+  Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns                    10
+    As in the daylight with its natural sense;
+  Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
+  Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
+    Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.
+
+  The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep                15
+    Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
+  Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
+    And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
+  Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
+  but all more dubious than the things of vision,             20
+    So that it knows not when it is beguiled.
+
+  No time abates the first despair and awe,
+    But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
+  Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
+    Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;                  25
+  Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
+  Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,
+    The soul is too outworn for wondering.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    IV
+
+  He stood alone within the spacious square
+    Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
+  With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
+    As if large multitudes were gathered round:
+  A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,               5
+  The glances burning with unnatural light:&mdash;
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: All was black,
+  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
+  A brooding hush without a stir or note,                     10
+  The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
+  And thus for hours; then some enormous things
+  Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               15
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
+  Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
+  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
+  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;                    20
+  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
+  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   25
+  As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
+  That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
+  Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
+  Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
+  A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell                 30
+  For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Meteors ran                   35
+  And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
+  The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
+  The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
+  The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
+  And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:               40
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Air once more,
+  And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;                      45
+  Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
+  The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
+  White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
+  The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
+    Yet I strode on austere;                                  50
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: On the left
+  The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
+  There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,           55
+  A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;
+  Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
+  And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               60
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: From the right
+  A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
+  A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
+  Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;                   65
+  O desolation moving with such grace!
+  O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
+    I fell as on my bier,
+    Hope travailed with such fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   70
+  As I came through the desert: I was twain,
+  Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
+  One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
+  And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
+  And she came on, and never turned aside,                    75
+  Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
+    And as she came more near
+    My soul grew mad with fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Hell is mild                  80
+  And piteous matched with that accursed wild;
+  A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
+  A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;
+  That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
+  Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:              85
+    The mystery was clear;
+    Mad rage had swallowed fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: By the sea
+  She knelt and bent above that senseless me;                 90
+  Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
+  She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
+  She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
+  Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:
+    And mad with rage and fear,                               95
+    I stood stonebound so near.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: When the tide
+  Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
+  She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne        100
+  Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
+  I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
+  Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
+    They love; their doom is drear,
+    Yet they nor hope nor fear;                               105
+    But I, what do I here?
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    V
+
+  How he arrives there none can clearly know;
+    Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
+  Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
+    Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
+  To reach it is as dying fever-stricken                      5
+  To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
+    And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.
+
+  But being there one feels a citizen;
+    Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
+  Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?                 10
+    And yet release does come; there comes a morn
+  When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
+  That all the world is changed for him completely,
+    And he is verily as if new-born.
+
+  He scarcely can believe the blissful change,                15
+    He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
+  Never again will he approach the range
+    Infected by that evil spell now burst:
+  Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city
+  Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,                20
+    With horror ever deepening from the first.
+
+  Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
+    A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,
+  And love them more than death or happy life,
+    They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;             25
+  Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
+  Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
+    Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    VI
+
+  I sat forlornly by the river-side,
+    And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
+  Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
+    Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
+  And heard the heave and plashing of the flow                5
+  Against the wall a dozen feet below.
+
+  Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
+    And under one, a few steps from my seat,
+  I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
+    Although I had not heard approaching feet:                10
+  These bodiless voices in my waking dream
+  Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:&mdash;
+
+  And you have after all come back; come back.
+  I was about to follow on your track.
+  And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.            15
+
+  That I have failed is proved by my return:
+  The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,
+  But listen; and the story you shall learn.
+
+  I reached the portal common spirits fear,
+  And read the words above it, dark yet clear,                20
+  "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"
+
+  And would have passed in, gratified to gain
+  That positive eternity of pain
+  Instead of this insufferable inane.
+
+  A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;                    25
+  First leave your hopes behind!&mdash;But years have passed
+  Since I left all behind me, to the last:
+
+  You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
+  This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
+  How could I seek to enter void of it?                       30
+
+  He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
+  And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
+  Without the payment of the settled toll?
+
+  Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
+  Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;             35
+  Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
+
+  This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
+  And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
+  They are so thin that it will never glut.
+
+  I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;                    40
+  And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
+  And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
+
+  When one casts off a load he springs upright,
+  Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
+  And briskly paces forward strong and light:                 45
+
+  But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
+  The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
+  Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.
+
+  And as they passed me, earnestly from each
+  A morsel of his hope I did beseech,                         50
+  To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.
+
+  No one would cede a little of his store,
+  Though knowing that in instants three or four
+  He must resign the whole for evermore.
+
+  So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;                        55
+  For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
+  Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.
+
+  The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
+  With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
+  We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;                   60
+
+  And sharing it between us, entrance win,
+  In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
+  Let us without delay our search begin.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   VII
+
+  Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
+    And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
+  And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
+    And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
+  But others think them visions of illusion,                  5
+  Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
+    No man there being wholly sane in mind.
+
+  And yet a man who raves, however mad,
+    Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
+  Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:                    10
+    The phantoms have no reticence at all:
+  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
+  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
+    The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
+
+  I have seen phantoms there that were as men                 15
+    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
+  Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
+    Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
+  The City rests for man so weird and awful,
+  That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,               20
+    And phantoms there may have their proper home.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   VIII
+
+  While I still lingered on that river-walk,
+    And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
+  I heard another couple join in talk,
+    And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
+  Seated against an elm bole on the ground,                   5
+  Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.
+
+  "I never knew another man on earth
+    But had some joy and solace in his life,
+    Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
+  My doom has been unmitigated dearth."                       10
+
+  "We gaze upon the river, and we note
+  The various vessels large and small that float,
+  Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."
+
+  "And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
+    Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;                   15
+    But homely love with common food and health,
+  And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."
+
+  "This all-too-humble soul would arrogate
+  Unto itself some signalising hate
+  From the supreme indifference of Fate!"                     20
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself; yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
+
+  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou               25
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,                   30
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
+  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
+  As to produce men when He might refrain!                    35
+
+  "The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
+  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
+  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
+
+  "While air of Space and Time's full river flow
+  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:                   40
+  It may be wearing out, but who can know?
+
+  "Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
+  That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
+  That it is quite indifferent to him.
+
+  "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?                45
+  It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
+  Then grinds him back into eternal death."
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    IX
+
+  It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
+    When wandering there in some deserted street,
+  The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
+    The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
+  Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?                 5
+  Who in this city of the stars abideth
+    To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?
+
+  The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
+    As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
+  The harness jingles, as it passes by;                       10
+    The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
+  A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
+  Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
+    And so it rolls into the night again.
+
+  What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?           15
+    Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
+  Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
+    Or Limbo of the scornful universe
+  The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
+  Of all things good which should have been our portions,     20
+    But have been strangled by that City's curse.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    X
+
+  The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
+    In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
+  High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
+    The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
+  And every window of its front shed light,                   5
+  Portentous in that City of the Night.
+
+  But though thus lighted it was deadly still
+    As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;
+  Perchance a congregation to fulfil
+    Solemnities of silence in this doom,                      10
+  Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
+  Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
+
+  Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
+    Whereon lay still light from the open door;
+  The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,                    15
+    Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
+  And ample stairways rose to left and right
+  Whose balustrades were also draped with night.
+
+  I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
+    Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;               20
+  But each was hung with its funereal pall,
+    And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
+  With picture or with statue or with bust,
+  all copied from the same fair form of dust:
+
+  A woman very young and very fair;                           25
+    Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
+  And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
+    And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
+  Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
+  these shapes lit up that mausolean night.                   30
+
+  At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
+    And reached an open oratory hung
+  With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
+    Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
+  And one lay there upon a low white bed,                     35
+  With tapers burning at the foot and head:
+
+  The Lady of the images, supine,
+    Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
+  And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
+    A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:              40
+  A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
+  Surmounted the large altar left in night:&mdash;
+
+  The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
+    In every one whereof thine image dwells,
+  Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.                  45
+
+  The inmost oratory of my soul,
+  Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
+  Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
+
+  I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
+  With eyes forever fixed upon that face,                     50
+  So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
+
+  I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
+  As patient as a statue carved in stone,
+  Of adoration and eternal grief.
+
+  While thou dost not awake I cannot move;                    55
+  And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
+  And I alive feel turning into stone.
+
+  Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
+  Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
+  Dear vision better than all death or life.                  60
+
+  But I renounce all choice of life or death,
+  For either shall be ever at thy side,
+  And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.&mdash;
+
+  He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
+    Intent upon that uncorrupted face,                        65
+  Entranced except his moving lips alone:
+    I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
+  This was the festival that filled with light
+  That palace in the City of the Night.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XI
+
+  What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
+    And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
+  And make their habitations in the tombs,
+    And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
+  And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error            5
+  To reach that void of darkness and old terror
+    Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?
+
+  They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
+    They have much goodness yet they do not well,
+  (The fools we know have their own paradise,                 10
+    The wicked also have their proper Hell);
+  They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
+  Much patience but their time endureth longer,
+    Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.
+
+  They are most rational and yet insane:                      15
+    And outward madness not to be controlled;
+  A perfect reason in the central brain,
+    Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
+  And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
+  The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly                     20
+    To cheat itself refusing to behold.
+
+  And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
+    And some renowned for genius and for worth;
+  And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
+    And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth             25
+  Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
+  All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
+    The saddest and the weariest men on earth.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XII
+
+  Our isolated units could be brought
+    To act together for some common end?
+  For one by one, each silent with his thought,
+    I marked a long loose line approach and wend
+  Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,            5
+  And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
+
+  Then I would follow in among the last:
+    And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
+  Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
+    With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:        10
+  Whence come you in the world of life and light
+  To this our City of Tremendous Night?&mdash;
+
+  From pleading in a senate of rich lords
+  For some scant justice to our countless hordes
+  Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:            15
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From wandering through many a solemn scene
+  Of opium visions, with a heart serene
+  And intellect miraculously bright:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   20
+
+  From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
+  By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
+  And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,                   25
+  Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
+  Of love and adoration and delight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
+  A nation which beneath my rule has grown                    30
+  Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From preaching to an audience fired with faith
+  The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
+  Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:        35
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From drinking fiery poison in a den
+  Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
+  Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   40
+
+  From picturing with all beauty and all grace
+  First Eden and the parents of our race,
+  A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From writing a great work with patient plan                 45
+  To justify the ways of God to man,
+  And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From desperate fighting with a little band
+  Against the powerful tyrants of our land,                   50
+  To free our brethren in their own despite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
+  Each one responded with his countersign,
+  Then entered the cathedral; and in turn                     55
+  I entered also, having given mine;
+  But lingered near until I heard no more,
+  And marked the closing of the massive door.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIII
+
+  Of all things human which are strange and wild
+    This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
+  And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
+    To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
+  That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating                  5
+  How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
+    How naught is constant on the earth but change.
+
+  The hours are heavy on him and the days;
+    The burden of the months he scarce can bear;
+  And often in his secret soul he prays                       10
+    To sleep through barren periods unaware,
+  Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
+  Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
+    He would outsleep another term of care.
+
+  Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make                    15
+    Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
+  This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
+    Wounded and slow and very venomous;
+  Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
+  Distilling poison at each painful motion,                   20
+    And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
+
+  And since he cannot spend and use aright
+    The little time here given him in trust,
+  But wasteth it in weary undelight
+    Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,             25
+  He naturally claimeth to inherit
+  The everlasting Future, that his merit
+    May have full scope; as surely is most just.
+
+  O length of the intolerable hours,
+    O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,                  30
+  O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
+    O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
+  Immutable for all of all our legions
+  Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
+    Not of your speed and variance WE complain.               35
+
+  WE do not ask a longer term of strife,
+    Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
+  We do not claim renewed and endless life
+    When this which is our torment here shall close,
+  An everlasting conscious inanition!                         40
+  We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
+    Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIV
+
+  Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
+    With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
+  And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
+    No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
+  No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,           5
+  And the high altar space was unillumed.
+
+  Around the pillars and against the walls
+    Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
+  Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
+    Perchance they were not a great multitude                 10
+  Save in that city of so lonely streets
+  Where one may count up every face he meets.
+
+  All patiently awaited the event
+    Without a stir or sound, as if no less
+  Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.                   15
+    And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
+  From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
+  Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
+
+  Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
+    Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;                  20
+  The head behind it of enormous size.
+    And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
+  Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
+  By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:&mdash;
+
+  O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                    25
+  O battling in black floods without an ark!
+    O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
+  My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
+  With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
+    Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!        30
+
+  My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
+  Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
+    And perish in your perishing unblest.
+  And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
+  Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35
+    To find some solace for your wild unrest.
+
+  And now at last authentic word I bring,
+  Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
+    Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
+  There is no God; no Fiend with names divine                 40
+  Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
+    It is to satiate no Being's gall.
+
+  It was the dark delusion of a dream,
+  That living Person conscious and supreme,
+    Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;              45
+  Whom we must curse because the life he gave
+  Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
+    Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
+
+  This little life is all we must endure,
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                   50
+    We fall asleep and never wake again;
+  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
+  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
+    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
+
+  We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55
+  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
+    To other beings with their own time-doom:
+  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
+  Infinite aeons after the last man
+    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          60
+
+  We bow down to the universal laws,
+  Which never had for man a special clause
+    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
+  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
+  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65
+    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
+
+  All substance lives and struggles evermore
+  Through countless shapes continually at war,
+    By countless interactions interknit:
+  If one is born a certain day on earth,                      70
+  All times and forces tended to that birth,
+    Not all the world could change or hinder it.
+
+  I find no hint throughout the Universe
+  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
+    I find alone Necessity Supreme;                           75
+  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
+  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
+    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
+
+  O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:                 80
+    Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+    Without the fear of waking after death.&mdash;
+
+  The organ-like vibrations of his voice                      85
+    Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+    Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still
+  As brooding on that "End it when you will."                 90
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XV
+
+  Wherever men are gathered, all the air
+    Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
+  Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
+  Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
+  Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,                      5
+  Are breathed into it with our respiration
+    It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
+
+  So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
+    As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
+  But nourishes warm life or hastens death                    10
+    With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
+  Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
+  Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;
+    He in his turn affecting all of  these.
+
+  That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,                   15
+    Although not many exiles wander there,
+  With many a potent evil influence,
+    Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
+  Infections of unutterable sadness,
+  Infections of incalculable madness,                         20
+    Infections of incurable despair.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XVI
+
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+    As musing on that message we had heard
+  And brooding on that "End it when you will;"
+    Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky                5
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:&mdash;
+
+  The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:
+    We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+    Can I find here the comfort which I crave?                10
+
+  In all eternity I had one chance,
+    One few years' term of gracious human life:
+  The splendours of the intellect's advance,
+    The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+  The social pleasures with their genial wit:                 15
+    The fascination of the worlds of art,
+  The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
+    By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+    The careless childhood and the ardent youth,              20
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+    The reverend age serene with life's long truth:
+
+  All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+    The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan              25
+    Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  This chance was never offered me before;
+    For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+  Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.                   30
+
+  And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+    A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+    So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,                  35
+    My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+    What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+    Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?        40
+  Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+    Hush and be mute envisaging despair.&mdash;
+
+  This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
+    Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,                   45
+    For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:&mdash;
+
+  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
+  This life itself holds nothing good for us,                 50
+    But ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
+    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XVII
+
+  How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
+    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
+  Their thick processions of supernal lights
+    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
+  And men regard with passionate awe and yearning             5
+  The mighty marching and the golden burning,
+    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
+
+  Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
+    Are glorified from vision as they pass
+  The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;          10
+    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
+  To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
+  Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
+    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.
+
+  With such a living light these dead eyes shine,             15
+    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
+  We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
+    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
+  Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;
+  There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,           20
+    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
+
+  If we could near them with the flight unflown,
+    We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
+  Or suns all self-consuming like our own
+    Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:                  25
+  They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
+  The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
+    The empyrean is a void abyss.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                  XVIII
+
+  I wandered in a suburb of the north,
+    And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
+  Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
+    Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
+  The air above was wan with misty light,                     5
+  The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.
+
+  I took the left-hand path and slowly trod
+    Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
+  The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
+    With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,                10
+  With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
+  So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.
+
+  After a hundred steps I grew aware
+    Of something crawling in the lane below;
+  It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there                15
+    That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
+  The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
+  To drag; for it would die in its own den.
+
+  But coming level with it I discerned
+    That it had been a man; for at my tread                   20
+  It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
+    Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
+  And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
+  Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.
+
+  A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,                  25
+    An infamy for manhood to behold.
+  He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
+    You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
+  And all that men go mad upon, since you
+  Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?                   30
+
+  You think that I am weak and must submit
+    Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
+  And you are dead as if I clove with it
+    That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!
+  I fling this phial if you seek to pass,                     35
+  And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.
+
+  And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!
+    Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.
+  If you could find, it would avail you naught;
+    Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:                40
+  For who of mortal or immortal race
+  The lifetrack of another can retrace?
+
+  Did you but know my agony and toil!
+    Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
+  My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;          45
+    Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
+  My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
+  I cannot move but with continual moan.
+
+  But I am in the very way at last
+    To find the long-lost broken golden thread                50
+  Which unites my present with my past,
+    If you but go your own way.  And I said,
+  I will retire as soon as you have told
+  Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.
+
+  And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;              55
+    I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back
+  From this accursed night without a morn,
+    And through the deserts which have else no track,
+  And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
+  To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:                          60
+
+  And I become a nursling soft and pure,
+    An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
+  Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
+    Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
+  Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,            65
+  And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.
+
+  He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
+    Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
+  And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
+    He should to antenatal night retrace,                     70
+  And hide his elements in that large womb
+  Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
+
+  And even thus, what weary way were planned,
+    To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
+  Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!              75
+    For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
+  What never has been, yet may have its when;
+  The thing which has been, never is again.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XIX
+
+  The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
+    With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
+  Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
+    Is named the River of the Suicides;
+  For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,              5
+  And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
+    Within its cold secure oblivion hides.
+
+  One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
+    As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
+  Another wades in slow with purpose set                      10
+    Until the waters are above him furled;
+  Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
+  Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
+    To starve or sink from out the desert world.
+
+  They perish from their suffering surely thus,               15
+    For none beholding them attempts to save,
+  The while thinks how soon, solicitous,
+    He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
+  Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
+  Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance                 20
+    Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.
+
+  When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
+    Why actors and spectators do we stay?&mdash;
+  To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;
+    To see what shifts are yet in the dull play               25
+  For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
+  Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
+    But those asleep at home, how blest are they!
+
+  Yet it is but for one night after all:
+    What matters one brief night of dreary pain?              30
+  When after it the weary eyelids fall
+    Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
+  And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
+  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
+    That one best sleep which never wakes again.              35
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                    XX
+
+  I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
+    And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
+  O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
+    A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
+  The great cathedral's western front stood there,            5
+  A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.
+
+  Before it, opposite my place of rest,
+    Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
+  A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
+    An angel standing in the moonlight clear;                 10
+  So mighty by magnificence of form,
+  They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.
+
+  Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword
+    The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
+  His vigilant intense regard was poured                      15
+    Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
+  Whose front was set at level gaze which took
+  No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.
+
+  And as I pondered these opposed shapes
+    My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon                20
+  Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
+    The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon
+  A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
+  And from the evil lethargy I woke.
+
+  The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,               25
+    And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
+  A warrior leaning on his sword alone
+    Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
+  The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
+  Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.                        30
+
+  Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
+    Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
+  The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
+    An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
+  Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept                35
+  Such mien as if open eyes it slept.
+
+  My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
+    A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
+  The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
+    And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head          40
+  Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
+  Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.
+
+  The moon had circled westward full and bright,
+    And made the temple-front a mystic dream,
+  And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,              45
+    The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
+  I pondered long that cold majestic face
+  Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                   XXI
+
+  Anear the centre of that northern crest
+    Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
+  From which the city east and south and west
+    Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
+  An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,                      5
+  The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,
+    Upon a graded granite base foursquare.
+
+  Low-seated she leans forward massively,
+    With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
+  Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;                       10
+    Across a clasped book in her lap the right
+  Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
+  With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
+    Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.
+
+  Words cannot picture her; but all men know                  15
+    That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
+  Three centuries and threescore years ago,
+    With phantasies of his peculiar thought:
+  The instruments of carpentry and science
+  Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance               20
+    With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;
+
+  Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
+    The grave and solid infant perched beside,
+  With open winglets that might bear a dove,
+    Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;                      25
+  Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
+  But all too impotent to lift the regal
+    Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;
+
+  And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
+    To mock her grand head and the knotted frown              30
+  Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
+    The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
+  Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
+  As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
+    The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;           35
+
+  The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
+    The massy rainbow curved in front of it
+  Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
+    The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,
+  Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions                   40
+  Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
+    The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.
+
+  Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
+    Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
+  Her fate heroic and calamitous;                             45
+    Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
+  Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
+  Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
+    Of the day setting on her baffled prime.
+
+  Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 50
+    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
+  Sustained by her indomitable will:
+    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
+  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
+  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre           55
+    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
+
+  But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
+    With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
+  A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
+    More desperate than strife with hope debarred,            60
+  More fatal than the adamantine Never
+  Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
+    Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
+
+  To sense that every struggle brings defeat
+    Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;             65
+  That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
+    Because they have no secret to express;
+  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
+  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
+    That all is vanity and nothingness.                       70
+
+  Titanic from her high throne in the north,
+    That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
+  In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
+    Over her Capital of teen and threne,
+  Over the river with its isles and bridges,                  75
+  The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,
+    Confronting them with a coeval mien.
+
+  The moving moon and stars from east to west
+    Circle before her in the sea of air;
+  Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.             80
+    Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
+  The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
+  The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
+    And confirmation of the old despair.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The City of Dreadful Night
+
+Author: James Thomson
+
+Posting Date: August 16, 2008 [EBook #1238]
+Release Date: March, 1998
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael C. Browning
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
+
+By James Thomson
+
+
+
+     Per me si va nella citta dolente.
+
+     --Dante
+
+
+     Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
+     D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
+     Girando senza posa,
+     Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;
+     Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
+     Indovinar non so.
+
+     Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
+     Ogni creata cosa,
+     In te, morte, si posa
+     Nostra ignuda natura;
+     Lieta no, ma sicura
+     Dell' antico dolor . . .
+     Pero ch' esser beato
+     Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.
+
+     --Leopardi
+
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+  Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
+    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
+  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
+    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
+  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             5
+  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
+    And wail life's discords into careless ears?
+
+  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
+    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
+  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                10
+    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
+  Because it gives some sense of power and passion
+  In helpless innocence to try to fashion
+    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
+
+  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   15
+    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
+  Or such as pasture and grow fat among
+    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
+  Or pious spirits with a God above them
+  To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      20
+    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
+
+  For none of these I write, and none of these
+    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
+  So may they flourish in their due degrees,
+    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             25
+  If any cares for the weak words here written,
+  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
+    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.
+
+  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
+    In that same city of tremendous night,                    30
+  Will understand the speech and feel a stir
+    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
+  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
+  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
+    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         35
+
+  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
+    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
+  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
+    To any who divined it not before:                         40
+  None uninitiate by many a presage
+  Will comprehend the language of the message,
+    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
+
+
+
+                                    I
+
+  The City is of Night; perchance of Death
+    But certainly of Night; for never there
+  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
+    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
+  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
+  The sun has never visited that city,
+    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
+
+  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
+    Though present in distempered gloom of thought
+  And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
+    But when a dream night after night is brought
+  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
+  Recur each year for several years, can any
+    Discern that dream from real life in aught?
+
+  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
+    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
+  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
+    The while all change and many vanish quite,
+  In their recurrence with recurrent changes
+  A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
+    We count things real; such is memory's might.
+
+  A river girds the city west and south,
+    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
+  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
+    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
+  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
+  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
+    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
+
+  Upon an easy slope it lies at large
+    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
+  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
+    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
+  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
+  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
+    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35
+
+  The city is not ruinous, although
+    Great ruins of an unremembered past,
+  With others of a few short years ago
+    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
+  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
+  In house or palace front from roof to basement
+    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
+
+  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
+    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
+  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
+    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
+  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
+  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
+    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
+
+  Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
+    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
+  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
+    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
+  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
+  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
+    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
+
+  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
+    A woman rarely, now and then a child:
+  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
+    To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
+  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
+  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
+    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
+
+  They often murmur to themselves, they speak
+    To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
+  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
+    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
+  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
+  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
+    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.                70
+
+  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
+    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
+  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
+    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain
+  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,            75
+  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
+    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
+
+  They leave all hope behind who enter there:
+    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
+  One anodyne for torture and despair;                        80
+    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
+  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
+  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
+    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave (1)
+
+       (1) Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet
+       flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang
+       ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within
+       easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it
+       will.
+
+
+
+                                    II
+
+  Because he seemed to walk with an intent
+    I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
+  Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
+    Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
+  Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet                5
+  We travelled many a long dim silent street.
+
+  At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
+    A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
+  Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
+    Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:                 10
+  He murmured to himself with dull despair,
+  Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  Then turning to the right went on once more
+    And travelled weary roads without suspense;
+  And reached at last a low wall's open door,                 15
+    Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
+  He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
+  Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
+
+  Then turning to the right resumed his march,
+    And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,    20
+  Until on stooping through a narrow arch
+    We stood before a squalid house at length:
+  He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
+  Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
+
+  When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,                 25
+    I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
+  Of desolation I had seen and heard
+    In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
+  Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
+  Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?              30
+
+  As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
+    He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
+  The signs and figures of the circling hours,
+    Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
+  The works proceed until run down; although                  35
+  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
+
+  Then turning to the right paced on again,
+    And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms
+  Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
+    And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;              40
+  And paused to murmur with the old despair,
+  Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+  I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
+    Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
+  He circled thus forever tracing out                         45
+    The series of the fraction left of Life;
+  Perpetual recurrence in the scope
+  Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. (1)
+
+                                                   LXX
+       (1) Life divided by that persistent three = --- = .210.
+                                                   333
+
+
+
+                                   III
+
+  Although lamps burn along the silent streets,
+    Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
+  The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
+    But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
+  The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,                    5
+  The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
+    The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
+
+  And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
+    The night remains for it as dark and dense,
+  Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns                    10
+    As in the daylight with its natural sense;
+  Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
+  Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
+    Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.
+
+  The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep                15
+    Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
+  Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
+    And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
+  Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
+  but all more dubious than the things of vision,             20
+    So that it knows not when it is beguiled.
+
+  No time abates the first despair and awe,
+    But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
+  Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
+    Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;                  25
+  Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
+  Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,
+    The soul is too outworn for wondering.
+
+
+
+                                    IV
+
+  He stood alone within the spacious square
+    Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
+  With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
+    As if large multitudes were gathered round:
+  A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,               5
+  The glances burning with unnatural light:--
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: All was black,
+  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
+  A brooding hush without a stir or note,                     10
+  The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
+  And thus for hours; then some enormous things
+  Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               15
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
+  Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
+  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
+  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;                    20
+  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
+  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
+    But I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   25
+  As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
+  That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
+  Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
+  Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
+  A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell                 30
+  For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Meteors ran                   35
+  And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
+  The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
+  The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
+  The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
+  And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:               40
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Air once more,
+  And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;                      45
+  Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
+  The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
+  White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
+  The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
+    Yet I strode on austere;                                  50
+    No hope could have no fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: On the left
+  The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
+  There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,           55
+  A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;
+  Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
+  And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
+    Yet I strode on austere;
+    No hope could have no fear.                               60
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: From the right
+  A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
+  A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
+  Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;                   65
+  O desolation moving with such grace!
+  O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
+    I fell as on my bier,
+    Hope travailed with such fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,                   70
+  As I came through the desert: I was twain,
+  Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
+  One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
+  And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
+  And she came on, and never turned aside,                    75
+  Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
+    And as she came more near
+    My soul grew mad with fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: Hell is mild                  80
+  And piteous matched with that accursed wild;
+  A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
+  A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;
+  That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
+  Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:              85
+    The mystery was clear;
+    Mad rage had swallowed fear.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: By the sea
+  She knelt and bent above that senseless me;                 90
+  Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
+  She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
+  She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
+  Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:
+    And mad with rage and fear,                               95
+    I stood stonebound so near.
+
+  As I came through the desert thus it was,
+  As I came through the desert: When the tide
+  Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
+  She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne        100
+  Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
+  I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
+  Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
+    They love; their doom is drear,
+    Yet they nor hope nor fear;                               105
+    But I, what do I here?
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+  How he arrives there none can clearly know;
+    Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
+  Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
+    Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
+  To reach it is as dying fever-stricken                      5
+  To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
+    And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.
+
+  But being there one feels a citizen;
+    Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
+  Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?                 10
+    And yet release does come; there comes a morn
+  When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
+  That all the world is changed for him completely,
+    And he is verily as if new-born.
+
+  He scarcely can believe the blissful change,                15
+    He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
+  Never again will he approach the range
+    Infected by that evil spell now burst:
+  Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city
+  Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,                20
+    With horror ever deepening from the first.
+
+  Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
+    A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,
+  And love them more than death or happy life,
+    They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;             25
+  Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
+  Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
+    Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.
+
+
+
+                                    VI
+
+  I sat forlornly by the river-side,
+    And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
+  Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
+    Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
+  And heard the heave and plashing of the flow                5
+  Against the wall a dozen feet below.
+
+  Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
+    And under one, a few steps from my seat,
+  I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
+    Although I had not heard approaching feet:                10
+  These bodiless voices in my waking dream
+  Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:--
+
+  And you have after all come back; come back.
+  I was about to follow on your track.
+  And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.            15
+
+  That I have failed is proved by my return:
+  The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,
+  But listen; and the story you shall learn.
+
+  I reached the portal common spirits fear,
+  And read the words above it, dark yet clear,                20
+  "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"
+
+  And would have passed in, gratified to gain
+  That positive eternity of pain
+  Instead of this insufferable inane.
+
+  A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;                    25
+  First leave your hopes behind!--But years have passed
+  Since I left all behind me, to the last:
+
+  You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
+  This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
+  How could I seek to enter void of it?                       30
+
+  He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
+  And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
+  Without the payment of the settled toll?
+
+  Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
+  Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;             35
+  Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
+
+  This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
+  And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
+  They are so thin that it will never glut.
+
+  I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;                    40
+  And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
+  And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
+
+  When one casts off a load he springs upright,
+  Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
+  And briskly paces forward strong and light:                 45
+
+  But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
+  The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
+  Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.
+
+  And as they passed me, earnestly from each
+  A morsel of his hope I did beseech,                         50
+  To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.
+
+  No one would cede a little of his store,
+  Though knowing that in instants three or four
+  He must resign the whole for evermore.
+
+  So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;                        55
+  For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
+  Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.
+
+  The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
+  With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
+  We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;                   60
+
+  And sharing it between us, entrance win,
+  In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
+  Let us without delay our search begin.
+
+
+
+                                   VII
+
+  Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
+    And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
+  And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
+    And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
+  But others think them visions of illusion,                  5
+  Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
+    No man there being wholly sane in mind.
+
+  And yet a man who raves, however mad,
+    Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
+  Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:                    10
+    The phantoms have no reticence at all:
+  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
+  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
+    The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
+
+  I have seen phantoms there that were as men                 15
+    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
+  Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
+    Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
+  The City rests for man so weird and awful,
+  That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,               20
+    And phantoms there may have their proper home.
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+  While I still lingered on that river-walk,
+    And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
+  I heard another couple join in talk,
+    And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
+  Seated against an elm bole on the ground,                   5
+  Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.
+
+  "I never knew another man on earth
+    But had some joy and solace in his life,
+    Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
+  My doom has been unmitigated dearth."                       10
+
+  "We gaze upon the river, and we note
+  The various vessels large and small that float,
+  Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."
+
+  "And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
+    Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;                   15
+    But homely love with common food and health,
+  And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."
+
+  "This all-too-humble soul would arrogate
+  Unto itself some signalising hate
+  From the supreme indifference of Fate!"                     20
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself; yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
+
+  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou               25
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,                   30
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
+  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
+  As to produce men when He might refrain!                    35
+
+  "The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
+  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
+  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
+
+  "While air of Space and Time's full river flow
+  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:                   40
+  It may be wearing out, but who can know?
+
+  "Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
+  That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
+  That it is quite indifferent to him.
+
+  "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?                45
+  It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
+  Then grinds him back into eternal death."
+
+
+
+                                    IX
+
+  It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
+    When wandering there in some deserted street,
+  The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
+    The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
+  Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?                 5
+  Who in this city of the stars abideth
+    To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?
+
+  The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
+    As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
+  The harness jingles, as it passes by;                       10
+    The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
+  A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
+  Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
+    And so it rolls into the night again.
+
+  What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?           15
+    Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
+  Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
+    Or Limbo of the scornful universe
+  The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
+  Of all things good which should have been our portions,     20
+    But have been strangled by that City's curse.
+
+
+
+                                    X
+
+  The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
+    In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
+  High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
+    The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
+  And every window of its front shed light,                   5
+  Portentous in that City of the Night.
+
+  But though thus lighted it was deadly still
+    As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;
+  Perchance a congregation to fulfil
+    Solemnities of silence in this doom,                      10
+  Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
+  Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
+
+  Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
+    Whereon lay still light from the open door;
+  The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,                    15
+    Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
+  And ample stairways rose to left and right
+  Whose balustrades were also draped with night.
+
+  I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
+    Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;               20
+  But each was hung with its funereal pall,
+    And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
+  With picture or with statue or with bust,
+  all copied from the same fair form of dust:
+
+  A woman very young and very fair;                           25
+    Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
+  And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
+    And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
+  Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
+  these shapes lit up that mausolean night.                   30
+
+  At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
+    And reached an open oratory hung
+  With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
+    Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
+  And one lay there upon a low white bed,                     35
+  With tapers burning at the foot and head:
+
+  The Lady of the images, supine,
+    Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
+  And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
+    A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:              40
+  A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
+  Surmounted the large altar left in night:--
+
+  The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
+    In every one whereof thine image dwells,
+  Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.                  45
+
+  The inmost oratory of my soul,
+  Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
+  Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
+
+  I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
+  With eyes forever fixed upon that face,                     50
+  So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
+
+  I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
+  As patient as a statue carved in stone,
+  Of adoration and eternal grief.
+
+  While thou dost not awake I cannot move;                    55
+  And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
+  And I alive feel turning into stone.
+
+  Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
+  Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
+  Dear vision better than all death or life.                  60
+
+  But I renounce all choice of life or death,
+  For either shall be ever at thy side,
+  And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.--
+
+  He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
+    Intent upon that uncorrupted face,                        65
+  Entranced except his moving lips alone:
+    I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
+  This was the festival that filled with light
+  That palace in the City of the Night.
+
+
+
+                                    XI
+
+  What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
+    And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
+  And make their habitations in the tombs,
+    And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
+  And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error            5
+  To reach that void of darkness and old terror
+    Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?
+
+  They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
+    They have much goodness yet they do not well,
+  (The fools we know have their own paradise,                 10
+    The wicked also have their proper Hell);
+  They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
+  Much patience but their time endureth longer,
+    Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.
+
+  They are most rational and yet insane:                      15
+    And outward madness not to be controlled;
+  A perfect reason in the central brain,
+    Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
+  And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
+  The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly                     20
+    To cheat itself refusing to behold.
+
+  And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
+    And some renowned for genius and for worth;
+  And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
+    And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth             25
+  Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
+  All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
+    The saddest and the weariest men on earth.
+
+
+
+                                   XII
+
+  Our isolated units could be brought
+    To act together for some common end?
+  For one by one, each silent with his thought,
+    I marked a long loose line approach and wend
+  Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,            5
+  And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
+
+  Then I would follow in among the last:
+    And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
+  Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
+    With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:        10
+  Whence come you in the world of life and light
+  To this our City of Tremendous Night?--
+
+  From pleading in a senate of rich lords
+  For some scant justice to our countless hordes
+  Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:            15
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From wandering through many a solemn scene
+  Of opium visions, with a heart serene
+  And intellect miraculously bright:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   20
+
+  From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
+  By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
+  And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,                   25
+  Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
+  Of love and adoration and delight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
+  A nation which beneath my rule has grown                    30
+  Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From preaching to an audience fired with faith
+  The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
+  Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:        35
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From drinking fiery poison in a den
+  Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
+  Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   40
+
+  From picturing with all beauty and all grace
+  First Eden and the parents of our race,
+  A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From writing a great work with patient plan                 45
+  To justify the ways of God to man,
+  And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  From desperate fighting with a little band
+  Against the powerful tyrants of our land,                   50
+  To free our brethren in their own despite:
+  I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+  Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
+  Each one responded with his countersign,
+  Then entered the cathedral; and in turn                     55
+  I entered also, having given mine;
+  But lingered near until I heard no more,
+  And marked the closing of the massive door.
+
+
+
+                                   XIII
+
+  Of all things human which are strange and wild
+    This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
+  And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
+    To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
+  That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating                  5
+  How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
+    How naught is constant on the earth but change.
+
+  The hours are heavy on him and the days;
+    The burden of the months he scarce can bear;
+  And often in his secret soul he prays                       10
+    To sleep through barren periods unaware,
+  Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
+  Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
+    He would outsleep another term of care.
+
+  Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make                    15
+    Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
+  This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
+    Wounded and slow and very venomous;
+  Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
+  Distilling poison at each painful motion,                   20
+    And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
+
+  And since he cannot spend and use aright
+    The little time here given him in trust,
+  But wasteth it in weary undelight
+    Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,             25
+  He naturally claimeth to inherit
+  The everlasting Future, that his merit
+    May have full scope; as surely is most just.
+
+  O length of the intolerable hours,
+    O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,                  30
+  O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
+    O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
+  Immutable for all of all our legions
+  Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
+    Not of your speed and variance WE complain.               35
+
+  WE do not ask a longer term of strife,
+    Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
+  We do not claim renewed and endless life
+    When this which is our torment here shall close,
+  An everlasting conscious inanition!                         40
+  We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
+    Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
+
+
+
+                                   XIV
+
+  Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
+    With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
+  And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
+    No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
+  No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,           5
+  And the high altar space was unillumed.
+
+  Around the pillars and against the walls
+    Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
+  Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
+    Perchance they were not a great multitude                 10
+  Save in that city of so lonely streets
+  Where one may count up every face he meets.
+
+  All patiently awaited the event
+    Without a stir or sound, as if no less
+  Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.                   15
+    And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
+  From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
+  Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
+
+  Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
+    Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;                  20
+  The head behind it of enormous size.
+    And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
+  Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
+  By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--
+
+  O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                    25
+  O battling in black floods without an ark!
+    O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
+  My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
+  With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
+    Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!        30
+
+  My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
+  Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
+    And perish in your perishing unblest.
+  And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
+  Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35
+    To find some solace for your wild unrest.
+
+  And now at last authentic word I bring,
+  Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
+    Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
+  There is no God; no Fiend with names divine                 40
+  Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
+    It is to satiate no Being's gall.
+
+  It was the dark delusion of a dream,
+  That living Person conscious and supreme,
+    Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;              45
+  Whom we must curse because the life he gave
+  Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
+    Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
+
+  This little life is all we must endure,
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                   50
+    We fall asleep and never wake again;
+  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
+  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
+    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
+
+  We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55
+  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
+    To other beings with their own time-doom:
+  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
+  Infinite aeons after the last man
+    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          60
+
+  We bow down to the universal laws,
+  Which never had for man a special clause
+    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
+  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
+  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65
+    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
+
+  All substance lives and struggles evermore
+  Through countless shapes continually at war,
+    By countless interactions interknit:
+  If one is born a certain day on earth,                      70
+  All times and forces tended to that birth,
+    Not all the world could change or hinder it.
+
+  I find no hint throughout the Universe
+  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
+    I find alone Necessity Supreme;                           75
+  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
+  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
+    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
+
+  O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:                 80
+    Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+    Without the fear of waking after death.--
+
+  The organ-like vibrations of his voice                      85
+    Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+    Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still
+  As brooding on that "End it when you will."                 90
+
+
+
+                                    XV
+
+  Wherever men are gathered, all the air
+    Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
+  Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
+  Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
+  Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,                      5
+  Are breathed into it with our respiration
+    It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
+
+  So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
+    As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
+  But nourishes warm life or hastens death                    10
+    With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
+  Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
+  Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;
+    He in his turn affecting all of  these.
+
+  That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,                   15
+    Although not many exiles wander there,
+  With many a potent evil influence,
+    Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
+  Infections of unutterable sadness,
+  Infections of incalculable madness,                         20
+    Infections of incurable despair.
+
+
+
+                                   XVI
+
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+    As musing on that message we had heard
+  And brooding on that "End it when you will;"
+    Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky                5
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:--
+
+  The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:
+    We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+    Can I find here the comfort which I crave?                10
+
+  In all eternity I had one chance,
+    One few years' term of gracious human life:
+  The splendours of the intellect's advance,
+    The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+  The social pleasures with their genial wit:                 15
+    The fascination of the worlds of art,
+  The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
+    By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+    The careless childhood and the ardent youth,              20
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+    The reverend age serene with life's long truth:
+
+  All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+    The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan              25
+    Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  This chance was never offered me before;
+    For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+  Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.                   30
+
+  And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+    A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+    So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,                  35
+    My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+    What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+    Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?        40
+  Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+    Hush and be mute envisaging despair.--
+
+  This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
+    Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,                   45
+    For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:--
+
+  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
+  This life itself holds nothing good for us,                 50
+    But ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
+    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.
+
+
+
+                                   XVII
+
+  How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
+    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
+  Their thick processions of supernal lights
+    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
+  And men regard with passionate awe and yearning             5
+  The mighty marching and the golden burning,
+    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
+
+  Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
+    Are glorified from vision as they pass
+  The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;          10
+    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
+  To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
+  Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
+    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.
+
+  With such a living light these dead eyes shine,             15
+    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
+  We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
+    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
+  Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;
+  There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,           20
+    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
+
+  If we could near them with the flight unflown,
+    We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
+  Or suns all self-consuming like our own
+    Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:                  25
+  They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
+  The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
+    The empyrean is a void abyss.
+
+
+
+                                  XVIII
+
+  I wandered in a suburb of the north,
+    And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
+  Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
+    Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
+  The air above was wan with misty light,                     5
+  The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.
+
+  I took the left-hand path and slowly trod
+    Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
+  The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
+    With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,                10
+  With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
+  So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.
+
+  After a hundred steps I grew aware
+    Of something crawling in the lane below;
+  It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there                15
+    That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
+  The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
+  To drag; for it would die in its own den.
+
+  But coming level with it I discerned
+    That it had been a man; for at my tread                   20
+  It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
+    Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
+  And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
+  Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.
+
+  A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,                  25
+    An infamy for manhood to behold.
+  He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
+    You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
+  And all that men go mad upon, since you
+  Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?                   30
+
+  You think that I am weak and must submit
+    Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
+  And you are dead as if I clove with it
+    That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!
+  I fling this phial if you seek to pass,                     35
+  And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.
+
+  And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!
+    Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.
+  If you could find, it would avail you naught;
+    Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:                40
+  For who of mortal or immortal race
+  The lifetrack of another can retrace?
+
+  Did you but know my agony and toil!
+    Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
+  My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;          45
+    Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
+  My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
+  I cannot move but with continual moan.
+
+  But I am in the very way at last
+    To find the long-lost broken golden thread                50
+  Which unites my present with my past,
+    If you but go your own way.  And I said,
+  I will retire as soon as you have told
+  Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.
+
+  And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;              55
+    I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back
+  From this accursed night without a morn,
+    And through the deserts which have else no track,
+  And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
+  To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:                          60
+
+  And I become a nursling soft and pure,
+    An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
+  Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
+    Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
+  Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,            65
+  And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.
+
+  He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
+    Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
+  And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
+    He should to antenatal night retrace,                     70
+  And hide his elements in that large womb
+  Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
+
+  And even thus, what weary way were planned,
+    To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
+  Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!              75
+    For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
+  What never has been, yet may have its when;
+  The thing which has been, never is again.
+
+
+
+                                   XIX
+
+  The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
+    With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
+  Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
+    Is named the River of the Suicides;
+  For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,              5
+  And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
+    Within its cold secure oblivion hides.
+
+  One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
+    As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
+  Another wades in slow with purpose set                      10
+    Until the waters are above him furled;
+  Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
+  Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
+    To starve or sink from out the desert world.
+
+  They perish from their suffering surely thus,               15
+    For none beholding them attempts to save,
+  The while thinks how soon, solicitous,
+    He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
+  Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
+  Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance                 20
+    Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.
+
+  When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
+    Why actors and spectators do we stay?--
+  To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;
+    To see what shifts are yet in the dull play               25
+  For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
+  Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
+    But those asleep at home, how blest are they!
+
+  Yet it is but for one night after all:
+    What matters one brief night of dreary pain?              30
+  When after it the weary eyelids fall
+    Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
+  And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
+  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
+    That one best sleep which never wakes again.              35
+
+
+
+                                    XX
+
+  I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
+    And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
+  O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
+    A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
+  The great cathedral's western front stood there,            5
+  A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.
+
+  Before it, opposite my place of rest,
+    Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
+  A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
+    An angel standing in the moonlight clear;                 10
+  So mighty by magnificence of form,
+  They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.
+
+  Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword
+    The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
+  His vigilant intense regard was poured                      15
+    Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
+  Whose front was set at level gaze which took
+  No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.
+
+  And as I pondered these opposed shapes
+    My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon                20
+  Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
+    The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon
+  A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
+  And from the evil lethargy I woke.
+
+  The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,               25
+    And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
+  A warrior leaning on his sword alone
+    Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
+  The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
+  Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.                        30
+
+  Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
+    Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
+  The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
+    An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
+  Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept                35
+  Such mien as if open eyes it slept.
+
+  My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
+    A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
+  The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
+    And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head          40
+  Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
+  Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.
+
+  The moon had circled westward full and bright,
+    And made the temple-front a mystic dream,
+  And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,              45
+    The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
+  I pondered long that cold majestic face
+  Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.
+
+
+
+                                   XXI
+
+  Anear the centre of that northern crest
+    Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
+  From which the city east and south and west
+    Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
+  An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,                      5
+  The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,
+    Upon a graded granite base foursquare.
+
+  Low-seated she leans forward massively,
+    With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
+  Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;                       10
+    Across a clasped book in her lap the right
+  Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
+  With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
+    Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.
+
+  Words cannot picture her; but all men know                  15
+    That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
+  Three centuries and threescore years ago,
+    With phantasies of his peculiar thought:
+  The instruments of carpentry and science
+  Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance               20
+    With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;
+
+  Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
+    The grave and solid infant perched beside,
+  With open winglets that might bear a dove,
+    Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;                      25
+  Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
+  But all too impotent to lift the regal
+    Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;
+
+  And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
+    To mock her grand head and the knotted frown              30
+  Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
+    The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
+  Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
+  As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
+    The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;           35
+
+  The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
+    The massy rainbow curved in front of it
+  Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
+    The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,
+  Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions                   40
+  Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
+    The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.
+
+  Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
+    Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
+  Her fate heroic and calamitous;                             45
+    Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
+  Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
+  Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
+    Of the day setting on her baffled prime.
+
+  Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 50
+    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
+  Sustained by her indomitable will:
+    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
+  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
+  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre           55
+    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
+
+  But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
+    With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
+  A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
+    More desperate than strife with hope debarred,            60
+  More fatal than the adamantine Never
+  Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
+    Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
+
+  To sense that every struggle brings defeat
+    Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;             65
+  That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
+    Because they have no secret to express;
+  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
+  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
+    That all is vanity and nothingness.                       70
+
+  Titanic from her high throne in the north,
+    That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
+  In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
+    Over her Capital of teen and threne,
+  Over the river with its isles and bridges,                  75
+  The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,
+    Confronting them with a coeval mien.
+
+  The moving moon and stars from east to west
+    Circle before her in the sea of air;
+  Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.             80
+    Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
+  The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
+  The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
+    And confirmation of the old despair.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson
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+Title: The City of Dreadful Night
+
+Author: James Thomson
+
+Release Date: March, 1998  [EBook #1238]
+[Most recently updated: June 16, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by Michael C. Browning
+
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+Etext prepared by Michael C. Browning
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
+
+BY
+
+JAMES THOMSON
+
+
+
+Per me si va nella citta dolente.
+
+--Dante
+
+
+Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
+D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
+Girando senza posa,
+Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;
+Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
+Indovinar non so.
+
+Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
+Ogni creata cosa,
+In te, morte, si posa
+Nostra ignuda natura;
+Lieta no, ma sicura
+Dell' antico dolor . . .
+Pero ch' esser beato
+Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.
+
+--Leopardi
+
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
+  My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
+Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
+  To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
+Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             5
+Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
+  And wail life's discords into careless ears?
+
+Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
+  To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
+Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                10
+  False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
+Because it gives some sense of power and passion
+In helpless innocence to try to fashion
+  Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.
+
+Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   15
+  Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
+Or such as pasture and grow fat among
+  The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
+Or pious spirits with a God above them
+To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      20
+  Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.
+
+For none of these I write, and none of these
+  Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
+So may they flourish in their due degrees,
+  On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             25
+If any cares for the weak words here written,
+It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
+  Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.
+
+Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
+  In that same city of tremendous night,                    30
+Will understand the speech and feel a stir
+  Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
+"I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
+Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
+  Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         35
+
+O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
+  Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
+Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
+  To any who divined it not before:                         40
+None uninitiate by many a presage
+Will comprehend the language of the message,
+  Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
+
+
+
+                                  I
+
+The City is of Night; perchance of Death
+  But certainly of Night; for never there
+Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
+  After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
+The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
+The sun has never visited that city,
+  For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
+
+Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
+  Though present in distempered gloom of thought
+And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
+  But when a dream night after night is brought
+Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
+Recur each year for several years, can any
+  Discern that dream from real life in aught?
+
+For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
+  Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
+And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
+  The while all change and many vanish quite,
+In their recurrence with recurrent changes
+A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
+  We count things real; such is memory's might.
+
+A river girds the city west and south,
+  The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
+Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
+  Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
+For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
+Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
+  Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
+
+Upon an easy slope it lies at large
+  And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
+Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
+  A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
+Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
+Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
+  And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35
+
+The city is not ruinous, although
+  Great ruins of an unremembered past,
+With others of a few short years ago
+  More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
+The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
+In house or palace front from roof to basement
+  Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
+
+The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
+  Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
+Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
+  The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
+Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
+Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
+  Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
+
+Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
+  Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
+So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
+  Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
+Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
+Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
+  Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
+
+Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
+  A woman rarely, now and then a child:
+A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
+  To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
+Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
+Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
+  To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
+
+They often murmur to themselves, they speak
+  To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
+Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
+  Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
+To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
+Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
+  To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.                70
+
+The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
+  There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
+The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
+  A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain
+Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,            75
+Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
+  This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
+
+They leave all hope behind who enter there:
+  One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
+One anodyne for torture and despair;                        80
+  The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
+Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
+But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
+  That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave
+
+[1] Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers
+    withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich
+    dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand,
+    which may pluck of them when it will.
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+Because he seemed to walk with an intent
+  I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
+Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
+  Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
+Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet                5
+We travelled many a long dim silent street.
+
+At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
+  A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
+Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
+  Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:                 10
+He murmured to himself with dull despair,
+Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+Then turning to the right went on once more
+  And travelled weary roads without suspense;
+And reached at last a low wall's open door,                 15
+  Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
+He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
+Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
+
+Then turning to the right resumed his march,
+  And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,    20
+Until on stooping through a narrow arch
+  We stood before a squalid house at length:
+He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
+Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
+
+When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,                 25
+  I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
+Of desolation I had seen and heard
+  In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
+Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
+Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?              30
+
+As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
+  He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
+The signs and figures of the circling hours,
+  Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
+The works proceed until run down; although                  35
+Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
+
+Then turning to the right paced on again,
+  And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms
+Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
+  And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;              40
+And paused to murmur with the old despair,
+Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
+
+I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
+  Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
+He circled thus forever tracing out                         45
+  The series of the fraction left of Life;
+Perpetual recurrence in the scope
+Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.[1]
+
+                                            LXX
+[1] Life divided by that persistent three = --- = .210.
+                                            333
+
+
+
+                                 III
+
+Although lamps burn along the silent streets,
+  Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
+The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
+  But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
+The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,                    5
+The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
+  The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
+
+And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
+  The night remains for it as dark and dense,
+Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns                    10
+  As in the daylight with its natural sense;
+Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
+Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
+  Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.
+
+The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep                15
+  Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
+Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
+  And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
+Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
+but all more dubious than the things of vision,             20
+  So that it knows not when it is beguiled.
+
+No time abates the first despair and awe,
+  But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
+Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
+  Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;                  25
+Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
+Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,
+  The soul is too outworn for wondering.
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+He stood alone within the spacious square
+  Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
+With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
+  As if large multitudes were gathered round:
+A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,               5
+The glances burning with unnatural light:--
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: All was black,
+In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
+A brooding hush without a stir or note,                     10
+The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
+And thus for hours; then some enormous things
+Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
+  But I strode on austere;
+  No hope could have no fear.                               15
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
+Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
+The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
+Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;                    20
+Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
+Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
+  But I strode on austere;
+  No hope could have no fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,                   25
+As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
+That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
+Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
+Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
+A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell                 30
+For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:
+  Yet I strode on austere;
+  No hope could have no fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: Meteors ran                   35
+And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
+The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
+The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
+The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
+And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:               40
+  Yet I strode on austere;
+  No hope could have no fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: Air once more,
+And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;                      45
+Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
+The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
+White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
+The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
+  Yet I strode on austere;                                  50
+  No hope could have no fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: On the left
+The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
+There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,           55
+A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;
+Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
+And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
+  Yet I strode on austere;
+  No hope could have no fear.                               60
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: From the right
+A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
+A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
+Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;                   65
+O desolation moving with such grace!
+O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
+  I fell as on my bier,
+  Hope travailed with such fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,                   70
+As I came through the desert: I was twain,
+Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
+One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
+And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
+And she came on, and never turned aside,                    75
+Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
+  And as she came more near
+  My soul grew mad with fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: Hell is mild                  80
+And piteous matched with that accursed wild;
+A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
+A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;
+That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
+Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:              85
+  The mystery was clear;
+  Mad rage had swallowed fear.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: By the sea
+She knelt and bent above that senseless me;                 90
+Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
+She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
+She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
+Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:
+  And mad with rage and fear,                               95
+  I stood stonebound so near.
+
+As I came through the desert thus it was,
+As I came through the desert: When the tide
+Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
+She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne        100
+Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
+I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
+Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
+  They love; their doom is drear,
+  Yet they nor hope nor fear;                               105
+  But I, what do I here?
+
+
+
+                                  V
+
+How he arrives there none can clearly know;
+  Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
+Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
+  Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
+To reach it is as dying fever-stricken                      5
+To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
+  And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.
+
+But being there one feels a citizen;
+  Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
+Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?                 10
+  And yet release does come; there comes a morn
+When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
+That all the world is changed for him completely,
+  And he is verily as if new-born.
+
+He scarcely can believe the blissful change,                15
+  He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
+Never again will he approach the range
+  Infected by that evil spell now burst:
+Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city
+Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,                20
+  With horror ever deepening from the first.
+
+Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
+  A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,
+And love them more than death or happy life,
+  They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;             25
+Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
+Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
+  Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+I sat forlornly by the river-side,
+  And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
+Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
+  Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
+And heard the heave and plashing of the flow                5
+Against the wall a dozen feet below.
+
+Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
+  And under one, a few steps from my seat,
+I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
+  Although I had not heard approaching feet:                10
+These bodiless voices in my waking dream
+Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:--
+
+And you have after all come back; come back.
+I was about to follow on your track.
+And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.            15
+
+That I have failed is proved by my return:
+The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,
+But listen; and the story you shall learn.
+
+I reached the portal common spirits fear,
+And read the words above it, dark yet clear,                20
+"Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"
+
+And would have passed in, gratified to gain
+That positive eternity of pain
+Instead of this insufferable inane.
+
+A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;                    25
+First leave your hopes behind!--But years have passed
+Since I left all behind me, to the last:
+
+You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
+This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
+How could I seek to enter void of it?                       30
+
+He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
+And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
+Without the payment of the settled toll?
+
+Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
+Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;             35
+Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
+
+This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
+And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
+They are so thin that it will never glut.
+
+I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;                    40
+And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
+And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
+
+When one casts off a load he springs upright,
+Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
+And briskly paces forward strong and light:                 45
+
+But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
+The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
+Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.
+
+And as they passed me, earnestly from each
+A morsel of his hope I did beseech,                         50
+To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.
+
+No one would cede a little of his store,
+Though knowing that in instants three or four
+He must resign the whole for evermore.
+
+So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;                        55
+For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
+Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.
+
+The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
+With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
+We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;                   60
+
+And sharing it between us, entrance win,
+In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
+Let us without delay our search begin.
+
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
+  And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
+And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
+  And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
+But others think them visions of illusion,                  5
+Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
+  No man there being wholly sane in mind.
+
+And yet a man who raves, however mad,
+  Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
+Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:                    10
+  The phantoms have no reticence at all:
+The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
+The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
+  The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
+
+I have seen phantoms there that were as men                 15
+  And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
+Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
+  Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
+The City rests for man so weird and awful,
+That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,               20
+  And phantoms there may have their proper home.
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+While I still lingered on that river-walk,
+  And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
+I heard another couple join in talk,
+  And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
+Seated against an elm bole on the ground,                   5
+Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.
+
+"I never knew another man on earth
+  But had some joy and solace in his life,
+  Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
+My doom has been unmitigated dearth."                       10
+
+"We gaze upon the river, and we note
+The various vessels large and small that float,
+Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."
+
+"And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
+  Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;                   15
+  But homely love with common food and health,
+And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."
+
+"This all-too-humble soul would arrogate
+Unto itself some signalising hate
+From the supreme indifference of Fate!"                     20
+
+"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+  I think myself; yet I would rather be
+  My miserable self than He, than He
+Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
+
+"The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou               25
+  From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+  Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred
+Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+"That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+  For all the temples to Thy glory built,                   30
+  Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+"As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
+At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
+As to produce men when He might refrain!                    35
+
+"The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
+It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
+It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
+
+"While air of Space and Time's full river flow
+The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:                   40
+It may be wearing out, but who can know?
+
+"Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
+That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
+That it is quite indifferent to him.
+
+"Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?                45
+It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
+Then grinds him back into eternal death."
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
+  When wandering there in some deserted street,
+The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
+  The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
+Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?                 5
+Who in this city of the stars abideth
+  To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?
+
+The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
+  As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
+The harness jingles, as it passes by;                       10
+  The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
+A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
+Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
+  And so it rolls into the night again.
+
+What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?           15
+  Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
+Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
+  Or Limbo of the scornful universe
+The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
+Of all things good which should have been our portions,     20
+  But have been strangled by that City's curse.
+
+
+
+                                  X
+
+The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
+  In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
+High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
+  The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
+And every window of its front shed light,                   5
+Portentous in that City of the Night.
+
+But though thus lighted it was deadly still
+  As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;
+Perchance a congregation to fulfil
+  Solemnities of silence in this doom,                      10
+Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
+Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
+
+Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
+  Whereon lay still light from the open door;
+The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,                    15
+  Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
+And ample stairways rose to left and right
+Whose balustrades were also draped with night.
+
+I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
+  Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;               20
+But each was hung with its funereal pall,
+  And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
+With picture or with statue or with bust,
+all copied from the same fair form of dust:
+
+A woman very young and very fair;                           25
+  Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
+And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
+  And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
+Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
+these shapes lit up that mausolean night.                   30
+
+At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
+  And reached an open oratory hung
+With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
+  Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
+And one lay there upon a low white bed,                     35
+With tapers burning at the foot and head:
+
+The Lady of the images, supine,
+  Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
+And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
+  A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:              40
+A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
+Surmounted the large altar left in night:--
+
+The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
+  In every one whereof thine image dwells,
+Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.                  45
+
+The inmost oratory of my soul,
+Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
+Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
+
+I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
+With eyes forever fixed upon that face,                     50
+So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
+
+I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
+As patient as a statue carved in stone,
+Of adoration and eternal grief.
+
+While thou dost not awake I cannot move;                    55
+And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
+And I alive feel turning into stone.
+
+Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
+Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
+Dear vision better than all death or life.                  60
+
+But I renounce all choice of life or death,
+For either shall be ever at thy side,
+And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.--
+
+He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
+  Intent upon that uncorrupted face,                        65
+Entranced except his moving lips alone:
+  I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
+This was the festival that filled with light
+That palace in the City of the Night.
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
+  And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
+And make their habitations in the tombs,
+  And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
+And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error            5
+To reach that void of darkness and old terror
+  Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?
+
+They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
+  They have much goodness yet they do not well,
+(The fools we know have their own paradise,                 10
+  The wicked also have their proper Hell);
+They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
+Much patience but their time endureth longer,
+  Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.
+
+They are most rational and yet insane:                      15
+  And outward madness not to be controlled;
+A perfect reason in the central brain,
+  Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
+And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
+The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly                     20
+  To cheat itself refusing to behold.
+
+And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
+  And some renowned for genius and for worth;
+And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
+  And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth             25
+Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
+All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
+  The saddest and the weariest men on earth.
+
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+Our isolated units could be brought
+  To act together for some common end?
+For one by one, each silent with his thought,
+  I marked a long loose line approach and wend
+Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,            5
+And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
+
+Then I would follow in among the last:
+  And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
+Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
+  With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:        10
+Whence come you in the world of life and light
+To this our City of Tremendous Night?--
+
+From pleading in a senate of rich lords
+For some scant justice to our countless hordes
+Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:            15
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From wandering through many a solemn scene
+Of opium visions, with a heart serene
+And intellect miraculously bright:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   20
+
+From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
+By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
+And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,                   25
+Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
+Of love and adoration and delight:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
+A nation which beneath my rule has grown                    30
+Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From preaching to an audience fired with faith
+The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
+Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:        35
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From drinking fiery poison in a den
+Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
+Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.                   40
+
+From picturing with all beauty and all grace
+First Eden and the parents of our race,
+A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From writing a great work with patient plan                 45
+To justify the ways of God to man,
+And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+From desperate fighting with a little band
+Against the powerful tyrants of our land,                   50
+To free our brethren in their own despite:
+I wake from daydreams to this real night.
+
+Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
+Each one responded with his countersign,
+Then entered the cathedral; and in turn                     55
+I entered also, having given mine;
+But lingered near until I heard no more,
+And marked the closing of the massive door.
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+Of all things human which are strange and wild
+  This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
+And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
+  To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
+That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating                  5
+How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
+  How naught is constant on the earth but change.
+
+The hours are heavy on him and the days;
+  The burden of the months he scarce can bear;
+And often in his secret soul he prays                       10
+  To sleep through barren periods unaware,
+Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
+Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
+  He would outsleep another term of care.
+
+Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make                    15
+  Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
+This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
+  Wounded and slow and very venomous;
+Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
+Distilling poison at each painful motion,                   20
+  And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
+
+And since he cannot spend and use aright
+  The little time here given him in trust,
+But wasteth it in weary undelight
+  Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,             25
+He naturally claimeth to inherit
+The everlasting Future, that his merit
+  May have full scope; as surely is most just.
+
+O length of the intolerable hours,
+  O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,                  30
+O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
+  O Life, whose woeful vanities remain
+Immutable for all of all our legions
+Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
+  Not of your speed and variance WE complain.               35
+
+WE do not ask a longer term of strife,
+  Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
+We do not claim renewed and endless life
+  When this which is our torment here shall close,
+An everlasting conscious inanition!                         40
+We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
+  Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
+
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
+  With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
+And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
+  No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
+No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,           5
+And the high altar space was unillumed.
+
+Around the pillars and against the walls
+  Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
+Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
+  Perchance they were not a great multitude                 10
+Save in that city of so lonely streets
+Where one may count up every face he meets.
+
+All patiently awaited the event
+  Without a stir or sound, as if no less
+Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.                   15
+  And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
+From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
+Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
+
+Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
+  Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;                  20
+The head behind it of enormous size.
+  And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
+Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
+By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--
+
+O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!                    25
+O battling in black floods without an ark!
+  O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
+My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
+With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
+  Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!        30
+
+My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
+Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
+  And perish in your perishing unblest.
+And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
+Of all our universe, with desperate hope                    35
+  To find some solace for your wild unrest.
+
+And now at last authentic word I bring,
+Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
+  Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
+There is no God; no Fiend with names divine                 40
+Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
+  It is to satiate no Being's gall.
+
+It was the dark delusion of a dream,
+That living Person conscious and supreme,
+  Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;              45
+Whom we must curse because the life he gave
+Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
+  Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
+
+This little life is all we must endure,
+The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                   50
+  We fall asleep and never wake again;
+Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
+Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
+  In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
+
+We finish thus; and all our wretched race                   55
+Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
+  To other beings with their own time-doom:
+Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
+Infinite aeons after the last man
+  Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          60
+
+We bow down to the universal laws,
+Which never had for man a special clause
+  Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
+If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
+If tigers burn with beauty and with might,                  65
+  Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
+
+All substance lives and struggles evermore
+Through countless shapes continually at war,
+  By countless interactions interknit:
+If one is born a certain day on earth,                      70
+All times and forces tended to that birth,
+  Not all the world could change or hinder it.
+
+I find no hint throughout the Universe
+Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
+  I find alone Necessity Supreme;                           75
+With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
+Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
+  For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
+
+O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;
+A few short years must bring us all relief:                 80
+  Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
+But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+  Without the fear of waking after death.--
+
+The organ-like vibrations of his voice                      85
+  Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+  Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+Our shadowy congregation rested still
+As brooding on that "End it when you will."                 90
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+Wherever men are gathered, all the air
+  Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
+Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
+Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
+Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,                      5
+Are breathed into it with our respiration
+  It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
+
+So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
+  As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
+But nourishes warm life or hastens death                    10
+  With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
+Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
+Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;
+  He in his turn affecting all of  these.
+
+That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,                   15
+  Although not many exiles wander there,
+With many a potent evil influence,
+  Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
+Infections of unutterable sadness,
+Infections of incalculable madness,                         20
+  Infections of incurable despair.
+
+
+
+                                 XVI
+
+Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+  As musing on that message we had heard
+And brooding on that "End it when you will;"
+  Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+When keen as lightning through a muffled sky                5
+Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:--
+
+The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:
+  We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+  Can I find here the comfort which I crave?                10
+
+In all eternity I had one chance,
+  One few years' term of gracious human life:
+The splendours of the intellect's advance,
+  The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+The social pleasures with their genial wit:                 15
+  The fascination of the worlds of art,
+The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
+  By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+  The careless childhood and the ardent youth,              20
+The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+  The reverend age serene with life's long truth:
+
+All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+  The storied memories of the times of old,
+The patient tracking of the world's great plan              25
+  Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+This chance was never offered me before;
+  For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
+This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.                   30
+
+And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+  A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+Of noble human life upon this earth
+  So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,                  35
+  My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+  What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+  Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?        40
+Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+  Hush and be mute envisaging despair.--
+
+This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
+  Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+And none gave answer for a certain while,                   45
+  For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:--
+
+My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
+This life itself holds nothing good for us,                 50
+  But ends soon and nevermore can be;
+And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
+  I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.
+
+
+
+                                 XVII
+
+How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
+  How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
+Their thick processions of supernal lights
+  Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
+And men regard with passionate awe and yearning             5
+The mighty marching and the golden burning,
+  And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
+
+Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
+  Are glorified from vision as they pass
+The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;          10
+  Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
+To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
+Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
+  Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.
+
+With such a living light these dead eyes shine,             15
+  These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
+We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
+  Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
+Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;
+There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,           20
+  They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
+
+If we could near them with the flight unflown,
+  We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
+Or suns all self-consuming like our own
+  Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:                  25
+They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
+The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
+  The empyrean is a void abyss.
+
+
+
+                                XVIII
+
+I wandered in a suburb of the north,
+  And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
+Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
+  Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
+The air above was wan with misty light,                     5
+The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.
+
+I took the left-hand path and slowly trod
+  Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
+The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
+  With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,                10
+With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
+So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.
+
+After a hundred steps I grew aware
+  Of something crawling in the lane below;
+It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there                15
+  That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
+The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
+To drag; for it would die in its own den.
+
+But coming level with it I discerned
+  That it had been a man; for at my tread                   20
+It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
+  Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
+And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
+Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.
+
+A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,                  25
+  An infamy for manhood to behold.
+He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
+  You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
+And all that men go mad upon, since you
+Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?                   30
+
+You think that I am weak and must submit
+  Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
+And you are dead as if I clove with it
+  That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!
+I fling this phial if you seek to pass,                     35
+And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.
+
+And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!
+  Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.
+If you could find, it would avail you naught;
+  Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:                40
+For who of mortal or immortal race
+The lifetrack of another can retrace?
+
+Did you but know my agony and toil!
+  Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
+My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;          45
+  Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
+My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
+I cannot move but with continual moan.
+
+But I am in the very way at last
+  To find the long-lost broken golden thread                50
+Which unites my present with my past,
+  If you but go your own way.  And I said,
+I will retire as soon as you have told
+Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.
+
+And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;              55
+  I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back
+From this accursed night without a morn,
+  And through the deserts which have else no track,
+And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
+To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:                          60
+
+And I become a nursling soft and pure,
+  An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
+Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
+  Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
+Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,            65
+And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.
+
+He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
+  Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
+And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
+  He should to antenatal night retrace,                     70
+And hide his elements in that large womb
+Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
+
+And even thus, what weary way were planned,
+  To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
+Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!              75
+  For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
+What never has been, yet may have its when;
+The thing which has been, never is again.
+
+
+
+                                 XIX
+
+The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
+  With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
+Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
+  Is named the River of the Suicides;
+For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,              5
+And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
+  Within its cold secure oblivion hides.
+
+One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
+  As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
+Another wades in slow with purpose set                      10
+  Until the waters are above him furled;
+Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
+Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
+  To starve or sink from out the desert world.
+
+They perish from their suffering surely thus,               15
+  For none beholding them attempts to save,
+The while thinks how soon, solicitous,
+  He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
+Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
+Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance                 20
+  Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.
+
+When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
+  Why actors and spectators do we stay?--
+To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;
+  To see what shifts are yet in the dull play               25
+For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
+Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
+  But those asleep at home, how blest are they!
+
+Yet it is but for one night after all:
+  What matters one brief night of dreary pain?              30
+When after it the weary eyelids fall
+  Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
+And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
+In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
+  That one best sleep which never wakes again.              35
+
+
+
+                                  XX
+
+I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
+  And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
+O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
+  A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
+The great cathedral's western front stood there,            5
+A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.
+
+Before it, opposite my place of rest,
+  Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
+A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
+  An angel standing in the moonlight clear;                 10
+So mighty by magnificence of form,
+They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.
+
+Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword
+  The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
+His vigilant intense regard was poured                      15
+  Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
+Whose front was set at level gaze which took
+No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.
+
+And as I pondered these opposed shapes
+  My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon                20
+Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
+  The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon
+A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
+And from the evil lethargy I woke.
+
+The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,               25
+  And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
+A warrior leaning on his sword alone
+  Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
+The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
+Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.                        30
+
+Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
+  Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
+The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
+  An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
+Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept                35
+Such mien as if open eyes it slept.
+
+My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
+  A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
+The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
+  And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head          40
+Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
+Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.
+
+The moon had circled westward full and bright,
+  And made the temple-front a mystic dream,
+And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,              45
+  The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
+I pondered long that cold majestic face
+Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.
+
+
+
+                                 XXI
+
+Anear the centre of that northern crest
+  Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
+From which the city east and south and west
+  Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
+An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,                      5
+The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,
+  Upon a graded granite base foursquare.
+
+Low-seated she leans forward massively,
+  With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
+Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;                       10
+  Across a clasped book in her lap the right
+Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
+With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
+  Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.
+
+Words cannot picture her; but all men know                  15
+  That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
+Three centuries and threescore years ago,
+  With phantasies of his peculiar thought:
+The instruments of carpentry and science
+Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance               20
+  With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;
+
+Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
+  The grave and solid infant perched beside,
+With open winglets that might bear a dove,
+  Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;                      25
+Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
+But all too impotent to lift the regal
+  Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;
+
+And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
+  To mock her grand head and the knotted frown              30
+Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
+  The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
+Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
+As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
+  The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;           35
+
+The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
+  The massy rainbow curved in front of it
+Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
+  The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,
+Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions                   40
+Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
+  The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.
+
+Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
+  Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
+Her fate heroic and calamitous;                             45
+  Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
+Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
+Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
+  Of the day setting on her baffled prime.
+
+Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 50
+  Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
+Sustained by her indomitable will:
+  The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
+And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
+Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre           55
+  That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
+
+But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
+  With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
+A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
+  More desperate than strife with hope debarred,            60
+More fatal than the adamantine Never
+Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
+  Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
+
+To sense that every struggle brings defeat
+  Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;             65
+That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
+  Because they have no secret to express;
+That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
+Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
+  That all is vanity and nothingness.                       70
+
+Titanic from her high throne in the north,
+  That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
+In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
+  Over her Capital of teen and threne,
+Over the river with its isles and bridges,                  75
+The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,
+  Confronting them with a coeval mien.
+
+The moving moon and stars from east to west
+  Circle before her in the sea of air;
+Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.             80
+  Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
+The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
+The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
+  And confirmation of the old despair.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT ***
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