Devoid of love, bereft of hope,
Companioned by a vague despair,
He roams where blinded spirits grope
O'er deserts hot and bare.

The narrow path is rough and hard,
And desolate the dreary land;
Hills glittering with flinty shard,—
Plains swept by burning sand;

Low clouds, through which swift lightnings play,
Freighted with never-falling rain,
Shroud cities crumbling in decay,
Whose gates he cannot gain.

His slow steps pass like throbs of fate
Where grinning skulls in thousands lie,
Mute records of remorseless hate,
Staring toward the sky.

Through darksome valleys, to the shore
Bestrewn with long-forgotten wrecks,
Damp, slimy weeds the only store
Between their rotten decks.

Down silent hollows of the sea
He floats, a horror-haunted thing,
Tide-swept past many a wide degree
Where long, dank grasses cling.

He feels the earthquake's mighty throe,
Sweep shuddering through the sombre waves,
And drifts where languid currents flow
In deep, far-reaching caves.

Dim caves, where shapes gigantic loom
In darkened depths of lucent green,
And cast a weird and ghostly gloom
The sunken ships between.

Then slowly he revolves again,
Where, with wind-tossed, disheveled locks,
Wild faces, white from ceaseless pain,
Fade down the sloping rocks.

Flung far along a trackless space,
Where lurid stars with flames alight,
Swing thundering in an endless race,
Through realms of doleful night;

Grand visions, lit by faces rare,
Gleam for a moment on his sight,
And then red fires in fierceness glare
On some demoniac fight.

There luring phantoms, saintly fair,
With passionate, love-throbbing zones,
Show, as he clasps their amber hair,
A mass of rattling bones.

So through long days, and years that grow
Bitter from loss of hope and trust,
And heavy with their load of woe,
He seeks for death and dust.

But time's decay is not for him—
The ages that resistless roll,
Have no nepenthe that can dim
The anguish of a soul.

The countless centuries that hold
Dead worlds to their oblivion tost,
Like short years, keen, and drear, and cold,
Speed by and leave him lost.