hat are those dark shapes, flitting about?
Flitting about, yet no ravens they,
Not foes, yet not friends--mute creatures of prey;
Their prey is lucre, their claws a knife,
Some say they take the beseeching life.
Horrible pity is theirs for despair,
And they the love-sacred limbs leave bare.
Love will come to-morrow, and sadness,
Patient for the fear of madness,
And shut its eyes for cruelty,
So many pale beds to see.
Turn away, thou Love, and weep
No more in covering his last sleep;
Thou hast him--blessed is thine eye!
Friendless Famine has yet to die.

[Illustration:

COME HITHER, YE CITIES! YE BALL-ROOMS TAKE BREATH!
SEE WHAT A FLOOR HATH THE DANCE OF DEATH.
_Canto_ IV. _p._ 22.]

A shriek!--Great God! what superhuman
Peal was that? Not man, nor woman,
Nor twenty madmen, crush'd, could wreak
Their soul in such a ponderous shriek.
Dumbly, for an instant, stares
The field; and creep men's dying hairs.

O friend of man! O noble creature!
Patient and brave, and mild by nature,
Mild by nature, and mute as mild,
Why brings he to these passes wild
Thee, gentle horse, thou shape of beauty?
Could he not do his dreadful duty,
(If duty it be, which seems mad folly)
Nor link thee to his melancholy?

Two noble steeds lay side by side,
One cropp'd the meek grass ere it died;
Pang-struck it struck t' other, already torn,
And out of its bowels that shriek was born.

Now see what crawleth, well as it may,
Out of the ditch, and looketh that way.
What horror all black, in the sick moonlight,
Kneeling, half human, a burdensome sight;
Loathly and liquid, as fly from a dish;
Speak, Horror! thou, for it withereth flesh.

"The grass caught fire; the wounded were by;
Writhing till eve did a remnant lie;
Then feebly this coal abateth his cry;
But he hopeth! he hopeth! joy lighteth his eye,
For gold he possesseth, and Murder is nigh!"

O goodness in horror! O ill not all ill!
In the worst of the worst may be fierce