PSYCHAURA

The wind of an autumn midnight
Is moaning around my door--
The curtains wave at the window,
The carpet lifts on the floor.

There are sounds like startled footfalls
In the distant chambers now,
And the touching of airy ringers
Is busy on hand and brow.

'Tis thus, in the Soul's dark dwelling--
By the moody host unsought--
Through the chambers of memory wander
The invisible airs of thought.

For it bloweth where it listeth,
With a murmur loud or low;
Whence it cometh--whither it goeth--
None tell us, and none may know.

Now wearying round the portals
Of the vacant, desolate mind--
As the doors of a ruined mansion,
That creak in the cold night wind.

And anon an awful memory
Sweeps over it fierce and high--
Like the roar of a mountain forest
When the midnight gale goes by.

Then its voice subsides in wailing,
And, ere the dawning of day,
Murmuring fainter and fainter,
In the distance dies away.

SUSPIRIA NOCTIS

Reading, and reading--little is the gain
Long dwelling with the minds of dead men leaves.
List rather to the melancholy rain,
Drop--dropping from the eaves.

Still the old tale--how hardly worth the telling!
Hark to the wind!--again that mournful sound,
That all night long, around this lonely dwelling,
Moans like a dying hound.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

(1809-1861)

It is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss
Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the _-esses_ of
"authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make
the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the
extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that
literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the
giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss Barrett, a hermitess in
Gloucester Place, who reads Greek as I do French, who has published some
translations from AEschylus, and some most striking poems,"--"Our sweet
Miss Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is to think of her." Of her
own life Mrs. Browning writes:--"As to stories, my story amounts to the
knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage
would have as good a story; most of my events a