TO ONE IN PARADISE. Thor wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine. Ah, dream too bright to last! Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise But to be overcast ! A voice from out the Future cries, "On! on!"--but o'er the Past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies Mute, motionless, aghast! For, alas! alas! with me The light of Life is o'er! "No more no more-no more (Such language holds the solemn sea To the sands upon the shore) Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, Or the stricken eagle soar! And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams. Y a route obscure and lonely, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE-out of TIME. Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, With forms that no man can discover For the dews that drip all over; Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging, unto skies of fire; Their lone waters-lone and dead, Their still waters--still and chilly With the snows of the lolling lily. By the lakes that thus outspread By the dismal tarns and pools Where dwell the Ghouls,By each spot the most unholy-In each nook most melancholy,There the traveller meets aghast Sheeted Memories of the Past Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth-and Heaven. |