, and the Sun sheds blood. They dreamed.
Earth that called me cold and pale, grows pale and cold,--
Now wearily her groaning axle turns
Those alternating glories that she rolled
To mock my ashen tombs and crater-urns!
No more her midnight ghouls nor lovers creep
To curse or bless my light; my shadow crawls
Like some dark moth upon her. I shall sleep
Equal with her in death. The tyrant falls!

The Element of Earth, waste and inert, hears at last the cry
of the Mother-globe.

Her crests and peaks, her vales and plains, lie white and whelmed
with snow.

The mountain ranges draw their icy shrouds over the faces of dead
continents.

A convulsion seizes on her granite heart, and the lips of her
hills are heard uttering their dirge.

SONG OF EARTH THE ELEMENT

SPRUNG molten from the fierce embrace of stars,
Graven by hungry seas and winds and fires--
Lo, my poor frame terrene with all its scars
Lies arid like the dross of blasted pyres!
Opulent fields and fruits, and forest tracts--
O fourfold largess of the seasons! grain,
Once on this bosom waving! cataracts
Poured from my heart!--each precious living vein
Of gold or gleaming mineral, and flower
And grass and mated creature that I gave
To man unstinted from my royal dower,
Lie cold in this my never-sated grave.
And he, my noblest offspring, whom my breasts
Suckled when ushered from my fertile womb,
Lies low in dark and underearthen nests,
Calling on slow and silent-footed doom.
No more, no more the joyous spring shall thaw
These crystal cere-cloths from my withered heart,--
No more shall Life his golden pageant draw,
Nor ever a seed shall spring nor a flower start.

The all-embracing and tender Air is without motion, lifeless
and exhaust.

His eight lordly sons lie undone in eight far regions of the globe.

Thinner and thinner grows the element as it is drained away to
dissolution.

Meteors from the outer vast pierce, unconsumed, the canopy of the
dying Air. The helpless Earth is smitten with showers of fire-javelins.

Sighs suffuse the atmosphere and putrescence rises with its legions
of leaden ghosts.

What is this sound, so low, so faint, so thin? It seems like the
first whisper of the youngest of all the Angels, or the last sigh
of the oldest of all Men.

It is the Song of the dying Air.

SONG OF AIR

DEAD! dark! flown! my primal happiness;
The stark ice ribs my high and ho