A MOOD.

Bowed hearts that hold the saddest memories

Are the most beautiful; and such make sweet

Light happy moods of alien natures which

Their sadness contacts, and so sanctifies.

And such to me is an old, gabled house,

Deserted and neglected and unknown

Within the dreamy hollow of its hills,

Dark, cedared hills and fruitless orchards sear;

With but its host of shrouded memories

Haunting its low and desolate rooms and halls,

Its roomy hearths and cob-webbed crevices.

Here in dim rainy noons I love to sit,

And hear the running rain along the roof,

The creak and crack of noises that are born

Of unseen and mysterious agencies;

The dripping footfalls of the wind adown

Lone winding stairways massy-banistered;

A clapping door and then a sudden hush

That brings a pleasant terror stiffening through

The tingling veins and staring from the eyes.

Then comes the running rain along the roof's

Rain-rotten gables and on rain-stained walls

Invokes vague images and memories

Of all its sometime lords and mistresses,

Until the stale material will assume

All that's clairvoyant, and the fine-strung ear

In quaint far rooms or dusty corridors

Hear wrinkled ladies all beruffled trail

Long haughty silks “miraculously stiff.”