atmosphere of mist and cloud,
With rare exotic charm's increase
This other Petra Camara dowed.

Warm orange tones are gilding yet
Her lovely skin of roseate hue.
Her eyelids fair have lashes jet
That beams of sunshine filter through.

There shimmers fine a pearly gleam
Between her scarlet lips elate;
Her beauty flashes forth supreme--
A bright south summer pomegranate.

Long to the sound of Spain's guitar,
I told her praise 'mid song and glass.
She came alone one evenstar,
And all my room Alhambra was.

Farther I see a robust Fair,
With strong and gem-beladen arms.
In pearls of price and velvet rare
Are set her ivory bosom's charms.

Her ennui is a weary queen's,
An adulating court amid.
Superb, aloof, her hand she leans
Upon a casket's jewelled lid.

Her sensuous lips their crimes confess,
As crimson with the blood of hearts.
With brutal, mad voluptuousness
Her conquering eye a challenge darts.

Here dwells, in lieu of tender grace,
Vertiginous allure, whereof
A cruel Venus ruled a race,
Presiding o'er malignant love.

Unnatural mother to her child,
This Venus all imperative!
O thou, my bitter joy and wild,--
Farewell forever! I forgive!

Within its frame in shadow fine,
The misty glass that still endures
Reveals another face than mine,--
The earliest of my portraitures.

A retrospective ghost, with face
Of vanished type, steps from the vast
Dim mirror of his biding-place
In tenebrous, forgotten past.

Gay in his doublet satin-rose,
Coloured in bold and vivid way,
He seems as if about to pose
For Deveria or Boulanger.

Terror of glabrous commoner,
His flowing locks in royal guise,
Like mane of lion, or sinister
King's hair, fall heavy to his thighs.

Romanticist of bold conceit,
Knight of an art which strives anew,
He hurled himself at Drama's feet,
When erst Hernani's trumpet blew.

Night falls. The corners are astir
With many shapes and shadows tall.
The Unknown--grim stage-carpenter--
Sets up its darksome frights o'er all.

A sudden burst of candles, weird
With aureoles, like lamps of death!
The room is populous, and bleared
With folk brought hither by a breath!

Down step the portraits from the wall,--
A ruddy-litten company!
Circling the fireplace in the hall,
Where the wood blazes suddenly.

The figures wrested from the tombs
Have lost their rigid, frozen mien,
The gradual glow of life illumes
The Past with flush incarnadine.

A colour lights the faces pale,
As