m;

Of the unlit windows behind her,
Of the timeless dial-stone,
Of the trees, and the moon, and the shadows,
A hundred years agone.

'Tis a night for all ghostly lovers
To haunt the best-loved spot:
Is he come in his dreams to this garden?
I gaze, but I see him not.

VII.

I will not look on her nearer--
My heart would be torn in twain;
From mine eyes the garden would vanish
In the falling of their rain!

I will not look on a sorrow
That darkens into despair;
On the surge of a heart that cannot--
Yet cannot cease to bear!

My soul to hers would be calling--
She would hear no word it said;
If I cried aloud in the stillness,
She would never turn her head!

She is dreaming the sky above her,
She is dreaming the earth below:--
This night she lost her lover,
A hundred years ago.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A PRESENCE YET NOT A PRESENCE.

The twilight had fallen while he wrote, and the wind had risen. It was
now blowing a gale. When he could no longer see, he rose to light his
lamp, and looked out of the window. All was dusk around him. Above and
below was nothing to be distinguished from the mass; nothing and
something seemed in it to share an equal uncertainty. He heard the
wind, but could not see the clouds that swept before it, for all was
cloud overhead, and no change of light or feature showed the shifting
of the measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the whole idea of the
creation. He was gazing into a void--was it not rather a condition of
things inappreciable by his senses? A strange feeling came over him as
of looking from a window in the wall of the visible into the region
unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore terrible, wherein wander the
things all that have not yet found or form or sensible embodiment, so
as to manifest themselves to eyes or ears or hands of mortals. As he
gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of the ships of chaos, dimly awful
suggestions of animals uncreate, yet vaguer motions of what was not,
came heaving up, to vanish, even from the fancy, as they approached his
window. Earth lay far below, invisible; only through the night came the
moaning of the sea, as the wind drove it, in still enlarging waves,
upon the flat shore, a level of doubtful grass and sand, three miles
away. It seemed to his heart as if the moaning were the voice of the
darkness, lamenting, like a repentant Satan or Judas, t