THE HAUNTED ROOM.

Its casements’ diamond disks of glass

Stare myriad on a terrace old,

Where urns, unkempt with ragged grass,

Foam o'er with frothy cold.

The snow rounds o'er each stair of stone;

The frozen fount is hooped with pearl;

Down desolate walks, like phantoms lone,

Thin, powd'ry snow-wreaths whirl.

And to each rose-tree's stem that bends

With silver snow-combs, glued with frost,

It seems each summer rosebud sends

Its airy, scentless ghost.

The stiff Elizabethan pile

Chatters with cold thro’ all its panes,

And rumbling down each chimney file

The mad wind shakes his reins.

Lone in the Northern angle, dim

With immemorial dust, it lay,

Where each gaunt casement's stony rim

Stared lidless to the day.

Drear in the Northern angle, hung

With olden arras dusky, where

Tall, shadowy Tristrams fought and sung

For shadowy Isolds fair.

Lies by a dingy cabinet

A tarnished lute upon the floor;

A talon-footed chair is set

Grotesquely by the door.

A carven, testered bedstead stands

With rusty silks draped all about;

And like a moon in murky lands

A mirror glitters out.

Dark in the Northern angle, where

In musty arras eats and clings

The drowsy moth; and frightened there

The wild wind sighs and sings

Adown the roomy flue and takes

And swings the ghostly mirror till

It shrieks and creaks, then pulls and shakes

The curtains with a will.

A starving mouse forever gnaws

Behind a polished panel dark,

And‘ long the floor its shadow draws

A poplar in the park.

I have been there when blades of light

Stabbed each dull, stained, and dusty pane;

I have been there at dead of night,

But never will again....

She grew upon my vision as

Heat sucked from the dry summer sod;

In taffetas as green as grass

Silent and faint she trod;

And angry jewels winked and frowned

In serpent coils on neck and wrist,

And‘ round her dainty waist was wound

A zone of silver mist.

And icy fair as some bleak land

Her pale, still face stormed o'er with night

Of raven tresses, and her hand

Was beautiful and white.

Before the ebon mirror old

Full tearfully she made her moan,

And then a cock crew far and cold;

I looked and she was gone.

As if had come a sullying breath

And from the limpid mirror passed,

Her presence past, like some near death

Leaving my blood aghast.

Tho’ I've been there when blades of light

Stabbed each dull, stained, and dusty pane;

Tho’ I've been there at dead of night,

I never will again.