THE HAUNTED CASTLE.

It stands alone on a haunted shore,

With curious words of deathless lore

On its massive gate impearled;

And its carefully guarded mystic key

Locks in its silent mystery

From the seeking eyes of the world.

Oft do its stately walls repeat

Echoes of music wildly sweet

Swelling to gladness high —

With mournful ballads of ancient time,

And funeral hymns — and a nursery rhyme

Dying away in a sigh.

Pictures out of each haunted room,

Up through the ghostly shadows loom,

And gleam with a spectral light;

Pictures lit with a radiant glow,

And some that image such desolate woe

That, weeping, you turn from the sight.

Shining like stars in the twilight gloom

Brows as white as a lily's bloom

Gleam from its lattice and door;

And voices soft as a seraph's note,

Through its mysterious chambers float

Back from eternity's shore.

In the mournful silence of midnight air

You hear on its stately and winding stair

The echoes of fairy feet.

Gentle footsteps that lightly fall

Through the enchanted castle hall,

And up in the golden street.

And still in a dark forsaken tower,

Crowned with a withered cypress flower,

Is a bowed head turned away;

A face like carved marble white,

Sweet eyes drooping away from the light,

Shunning the eye of day.

And oft when the light burns low and dim

A haggard form ungainly and grim

Unbidden enters the door;

With chiding eyes whose burning light

You fain would bury in darkness and night,

Never to meet you more.

Mysteries strange its still walls keep,

Strange are the forms that through it sweep —

Walking by night and by day.

But evermore will the castle hall

Echo their footsteps’ phantom fall,

Till its walls shall crumble away.