A ceaseless whisper--like an eery lyre
Struck in the Erl-king's halls, where ghosts and dreams
Hold revelry, your goblin music screams,
Shivering and strange as some strange thought come true.

Brown as the agaric that frills dead trees,
Or those fantastic fungi of the woods
That crowd the dampness--are you kin to these
In some mysterious way that still eludes
My fancy? you, who haunt the solitudes
With witch-like wailings? voice, that seems to freeze
Out of the darkness,--like the scent which broods,
Rank and rain-sodden, over autumn nooks,--
That, to the mind, might well suggest such looks,
Ghastly and gray, as pale clairvoyance sees.

You people night with weirdness: lone and drear,
Beneath the stars, you cry your wizard runes;
And in the haggard silence, filled with fear,
Your shuddering hoot seems some bleak grief that croons
Mockery and terror; or,--beneath the moon's
Cloud-hurrying glimmer,--to the startled ear,
Crazed, madman snatches of old, perished tunes,
The witless wit of outcast Edgar there
In the wild night; or, wan with all despair,
The mirthless laughter of the Fool in Lear.

THE CHIPMUNK.

He makes a roadway of the crumbling fence,
Or on the fallen tree,--brown as a leaf
Fall stripes with russet,--gambols down the dense
Green twilight of the woods. We see not whence
He comes, nor whither--'tis a time too brief!--
He vanishes;--swift carrier of some Fay,
Some pixy steed that haunts our child-belief--
A goblin glimpse from woodland way to way.

What harlequin mood of nature qualified
Him so with happiness? and limbed him with
Such young activity as winds, that ride
The ripples, have, that dance on every side?
As sunbeams know, that urge the sap and pith
Through hearts of trees? yet made him to delight,
Gnome-like, in darkness,--like a moonlight myth,--
Lairing in labyrinths of the under night.

Here, by a rock, beneath the moss, a hole
Leads to his home, the den wherein he sleeps;
Lulled by near noises of the cautious mole
Tunnelling its mine--like some ungainly Troll--
Or by the tireless cricket there that keeps
Picking its drowsy and monotonous lute;
Or slower sounds of grass that creeps and creeps,
And trees unrolling mighty root on root.

Such is the music of his sleeping hours.
Day hath another--'tis a melody
He trips to, made by