ams my flesh accepted,
My mind refused to hear--
Of one I loved and loved not,
Whose spirit now spake near.

And, lo! a voice before me
Kept calling constantly
The hopes my mind accepted,
My flesh refused to see--
Of one I loved and loved not,
Whose spirit spake to me.

This way the one would bid me;
This way the other saith:--
Sweet is the voice behind me
Of LIFE that followeth;
And sweet the voice before me
Of LIFE whose name is DEATH.

SUNSET IN _Autumn_.

Blood-coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;
Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras,
And broom-sedge strips of smoky pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass,
In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain-pools gleam like glass.

From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,
The winds,--the sowers of the LORD,--with thunderous footsteps stride;
Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,
Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.

The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;
And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell
Glimmers; while wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell
Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.

The oaks against a copper sky--o'er which, like some black lake
Of DIS, dark clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break--
Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales, that make
A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.

Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a Limbo-litten pane,
Within its wall of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,
On which the wild geese ink themselves, a far triangled train;
And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night is here again.

THE LEGEND OF THE STONE.

The year was dying, and the day
Was almost dead;
The West, beneath a sombre gray,
Was sombre red.
The gravestones in the ghostly light,
'Mid trees half bare,
Seemed phantoms, clothed in glimmering white,
That haunted there.

I stood beside the grave of one,
Who, here in life,
Had wronged my home; who had undone
My child and wife.
I stood beside his grave until
The moon came up--
As if the dark, unhallowed