Leaps the echo, and round and round
Beating itself against the roof,--
A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound,--
Dies ere its terror can utter proof

Of that it knows. A door is fast,
And none is suffered to enter there.
His sacred majesty could not bear
To look at it toward the last,
As he grew very old. It opened where
The queen died young so many years past.

III.

How the queen died is not certainly known;
But in the palace's solitude
A harking dread and horror brood,
And a silence, as if a mortal groan
Had been hushed the moment before, and would
Break forth again when you were gone.

The present king has never dwelt
In the desolate palace. From year to year
In the wide and stately garden drear
The snows and the snowy blossoms melt
Unheeded, and a ghastly fear
Through all the shivering leaves is felt.

By night the gathering shadows creep
Along the dusk and hollow halls,
And the slumber-broken palace calls
With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep;
And then the ghostly moonlight falls
Athwart the darkness brown and deep.

At early dawn the light wind sighs,
And through the desert garden blows
The wasted sweetness of the rose;
At noon the feverish sunshine lies
Sick in the walks. But at evening's close,
When the last, long rays to the windows rise,

And with many a blood-red, wrathful streak
Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur
His cruel vigilance and her
Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak
A hopeless hate that cannot stir,
A voiceless hate that cannot speak

In the awful calm of the sleepless eyes;
And as if she saw her murderer glare
On her face, and he the white despair
Of his victim kindle in wild surmise,
Confronted the conscious pictures stare,--
And their secret back into darkness dies.

THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.[2]

I.

Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
Downcast, through the garden goes:
He is hurt with the grace of the lily,
And the beauty of the rose.

For what is the grace of the lily
But her own slender grace?
And what is the rose's beauty
But the beauty of her face?--

Who sits beside her window
Waiting to welcome him,
That comes so lothly toward her
With his visage sick and dim.

"Ah! lily, I come to break thee!
Ah! rose, a bitter rain
Of tears shall bea