No sound, no sight as far as eye could stram. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof-to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it ; The river which had done them all the wrong, XXI Which, while I forded,-good saints, how I feared XXII Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, XXIII The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. None out of it. Mad brewage set to work XXIV And more than that—a furlong on-why, there! Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, .t would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with ; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood Bog, clay, and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. XXVI Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him XXVII And just as far as ever from the end, Nought in the distance but the evening, nought To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend, Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap-perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains-with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you ! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when-In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts-you 're inside the den. XXX Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Couched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight, While, to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII Not see? because of night perhaps?-why, day Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,— "Now stab and end the creature-to the heft!" XXXIII Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled Lost, lost one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL. SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN EUROPE. LET us begin and carry up this corpse, Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes, Each in its tether Sleeping safe in the bosom of the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row ! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights Our low life was the level's and the night's: Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, This is our master, famous, calm and dead, Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft Safe from the weather! He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! Cramped and diminished, Moaned he," New measures, other feet anon! 66 My dance is finished?" No, that's the world's way; (keep the mountain-side, |