re? Hold back thy fleet-wing'd coursers, Time,
Whilst we bethink us! Ah--such place there is!
Close, too, at hand--a place wherein a man
Might lie till doomsday safer from the touch
Of prying clown than is the spiced dust
Of an Egyptian in his pyramid.

At a dark alcove's end of that long hall,
The ancient armor-room in the east wing,
A certain door (whereof no mortal knew
save Wyndham, now that other lay a-cold)
Was to the panels of the wall so set,
And with such devilish shrewdness overlaid
By carvings of wild-flower and curled grape-leaf,
That one not in the favor of the trick,
Albeit he knew such mechanism was,
Ere he put finger on the secret spring
Had need of Job for ancestor, in faith!
You pressed a rose, a least suspected rose,
And two doors turned on hinge, the inner door
Closing a space of say some six feet square,
Unlighted, sheathed with iron. Doubtless here
The mediaeval Wyndhams hid their plate
When things looked wicked from the outer wall,
Or, on occasion, a grim ruthless lord
Immured some inconvenient two-faced friend--
To banquet bidden, and kept over night.
Such pranks were played in Merrie England then.
Sealed in the narrow compass of that cell,
Shut from God's light and his most precious air,
A man might have of life a half-hour's lease
If he were hale and well-breathed at the start.

Hither did Richard bear his brother's corse
And fling it down. Upon the stone-paved floor
In a thin strip of moonlight flung it down,
And then drew breath. Perhaps he paused to glance
At the white face there, with the strange half-smile
Out-living death, the brightness of the hair
Lying in loops and tangles round the brow--
A seraph's face of silver set in gold,
Such as the deft Italians know to carve;
Perhaps his tiger's blood cooled then, perhaps
Swift pity at his very heart-strings tugged,
And he in that black moment of remorse,
Seeing how there his nobler self lay slain,
Had bartered all this jewel-studded earth
To win life's color back to that wan cheek.
Ah, let us hope it, and some mercy feel,
Since each at compt shall need of mercy have.
Now how it happened, whether 't was the wind,
Or whether 't was some incorporeal hand
That reached down thro