Gone!--'twas only a vision!--
Gone! like a thought, a gleam!--
Such to our indecision
Utter no empty mission,
Truer than that they seem.

4

_He sinks into deep thought._

There are shadows that compel us,
There are voices that control;
More than substance these can tell us,
Speaking to the human soul.

In the moonlight, when it glistened
On my window, white as snow,
Once I woke and, leaning, listened
To a voice that sang below.

Full of gladness, full of yearning,
Strange with dreamy melody,
Like a bird whose heart is burning,
Wildly sweet it sang to me.

I arose; and by the starlight,
Pale beneath the mystic sky,
I have seen it full of far light,--
My dead joy go singing by.

In the darkness, when the glimmer
Of the storm was on the pane,
I have sat and heard a dimmer
Voice lamenting in the rain.

Full of parting and unspoken
Heartbreak, faint with agony,
Like a bird whose heart is broken,
Sadly low it cried to me.

I arose; and in the darkness
Wan beneath the haunted sky,
I have seen it, cold to starkness,--
My dead love go weeping by.

5

_He arouses from his abstraction._

So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities,--a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death triumphant in a thorny place
Among Love's ruined roses and dead dreams.

Since she is gone, no more I see the light,--
Since she has left all dark,--
Cleave like a revelation through the night.
I wander blindly, filled with fear and fright,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of life, where Hope, amid the skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.

Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o'erawe,--
Now she has passed from me,--
Questions God's justice that seems full of flaw
As is His world, where misery is law,
And men but fools too willing to be slaves.--
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night, and I no longer see.

6

_He looks from his window toward the sombre west._

Ridged and bleak the gray forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken