ons with reeling masts
And leaking hold we steered.

Then black as blood through streaming scud
Land loomed above our boom,
A land of iron gulfs and crags
And cataracts, like wind-tossed rags,
And caverns lost in gloom.

And burning white on every height,
And white in every cave,
A naked spirit, with a flame,
Now gleamed, now vanished; went and came
Above the whining wave.

No mortal thing of foot or wing
Made glad its steep and strand;
But voices, voices seemingly--
Vague voices of the sky and sea--
Peopled the demon land.

Yea, everywhere, in earth and air,
A lamentation wept;
That, gathering strength above, below,
Now like a mighty wind of woe,
Around the island swept.

And in that sound, it seemed, was bound
All life's despair of art;
The bitterness of joy that died;
The anguish of faith's crucified;
And love that broke its heart.

The ghost it seemed of all we'd dreamed,
Of all we had desired;
That--turned a curse, an empty cry--
With wailing words went trailing by
In hope's dead robes attired.

And could this be the land that we
Had sought for soon and late?
Those Islands of the Blest, the fair,
Where we had hoped to ease our care
And end the fight with fate?

O lie that lured! O pain endured!
O years of toil and thirst!
Where we had looked for blessed ground
The Islands of the Damned we found,
And in the end--were curst!

A. D. NINETEEN HUNDRED.

War and Disaster, Famine and Pestilence,
Vaunt-couriers of the Century that comes,
Behold them shaking their tremendous plumes
Above the world! where all the air grows dense
With rumors of destruction and a sense,
Cadaverous, of corpses and of tombs
Predestined; while,--like monsters in the glooms,--
Bristling with battle, shadowy and immense,
The Nations rise in wild apocalypse.--
Where now the boast Earth makes of civilization?
Its brag of Christianity?--In vain
We seek to see them in the dread eclipse
Of hell and horror, all the devastation
Of Death triumphant on his hills of slain.

CAVERNS.

_Written of Colossal Cave, Kentucky._

Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the D