The nerve-dissolving melody

Fluttered headlong from the sky.

And then I looked up toward a mountain-tract,
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,

God made himself an awful rose of dawn,

Unheeded and detaching, fold by fold,

:

From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,
A vapor heavy, hueless, formless, cold,

Came floating on for many a month and year,
Unheeded and I thought I would have spoken,
And warned that madman ere it grew too late :
But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,
When that cold vapor touched the palace gate,
And linked again. I saw within my head
A gray and gap-toothed man as lean as death,
Who slowly rode across a withered heath,
And lighted at a ruined inn, and said:

"Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!

Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute, and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.

50

55

60

こう

"Bitter barmaid, waning fast!
See that sheets are on my bed;
What! the flower of life is past:
It is long before you wed.

"Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour, At The Dragon on the heath!

Let us have a quiet hour,

Let us hob-and-nob with Death.

70

"I am old, but let me drink;

Bring me spices, bring me wine;

I remember, when I think,

That my youth was half divine.

"Wine is good for shrivelled lips,

When a blanket wraps the day,

When the rotten woodland drips,

25

80

And the leaf is stamped in clay.

"Sit thee down, and have no shame, Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee: What care I for any name?

What for order or degree?

85

"Let me screw thee up a peg:

Let me loose thy tongue with wine. Callest thou that thing a leg?

Which is thinnest ? thine or mine?

"Name and fame! to fly sublime

Through the courts, the camps, the schools,

Is to be the ball of Time,

Bandied in the hands of fools.

"Virtue! - to be good and just

Every heart, when sifted well,

Is a clot of warmer dust,

Mixed with cunning sparks of hell.

110

"O! we two as well can look

Whited thought and cleanly life

As the priest, above his book

Leering at his neighbor's wife.

115

"Fill the cup, and fill the can :

Have a rouse before the morn:

120

Every minute dies a man,

Every minute one is born

"Drink, and let the parties rave:

They are filled with idle spleen,

Rising, falling, like a wave,

For they know not what they mean.

125

VOL. II.

She is of an ancient house :

And I think we know the hue
Of that cap upon her brows.

"Let her go! her thirst she slakes
Where the bloody conduit runs:
Then her sweetest meal she makes
On the first-born of her sons.

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