PART IV.

A solitary grave retired, apart
From turfy mounds, and pale grey avenues
Of headstones lettered by faint records, telling
Or truth or lie, in a lone churchyard rose.
The congregation of the dead convened
In their dark chambers of unconsciousness;
Sun, life, and air, gay maskers, revelling
Above their mystery inscrutable.

That grey stone looked as if its tenant thus
Had dwelt apart from the great multitude,
And sought seclusion even in nothingness.
Close to the boundary of the ivied wall
It peered o'er the rank grass that flourished round;
A low slight railing measured forth that spot
Where couched the dead, o'er which the hand could tend
The planted flowers. The crowning headstone rose
Like the pale forehead of a grey-haired seer
Looking austerity in bloodless age.
Upon its front was traced in sculpture fine
A fallen lily broken from its stem;
The stricken head showed like a human thing
Neglected in its sorrow; it was felt
That youth in its first spring was buried there.
The bed of fresh earth was with lilies filled,
Nourished from tendency of hands unseen,
But seared and sickly, semi-animate,
Though living still, or rather daily dying
On that clay soil.

The broad Moon rose in heaven,
And shed beneath a ghostly shimmering
Over graves dark and chill; a silvery veil
Covering, but hiding not, the heaving mounds
Like waves amid their rolling motionless.
It hung within the hollow dome of Night
Shining through faintly-lighted aisles till lost
In palpable depths of darkness.
Caves of cloud
Unfolding their ethereal gates, revealed
The scintillations of life measureless;
Infinite gems of light embedded far
In dim recesses of that Ocean deep.
Then silently those mighty vestibules
Closed on that vision; wherefore shown to man
But that the gazer, watching from the brink
Of his leaf-world, should feel his nothingness?
Slowly and solemnly as if Death spake,
The iron tongue of Time tolled forth the hour;
Then, as a ghost awakened by that note,
A figure upward grew as from the earth,
As if of the substantial darkness formed,
A living resurrection from the grave
Whereby he knelt; his heart-aches had been told,
The prayer of faith, and that humility
Which like a panoply invests the soul
With its invincible mail.
He rose as him
Who hath the holy tribute of his love confessed
To the dead audibly; the inner hope
Whispered from the deep utterance of his soul
Whose meed was peace and self-entailed repose.
Material witness, like faith sphered above,
The Moon, receiving lustre not her own,
Cast her pale light upon his face upraised,
Deadening its pallor; and to that calm brow
The impress gave of magisterial power,
Drawn from the faith that lives beyond the grave.

He felt the solemn knowledge that on earth
There is no thing of life, or motionless,
Or moving, wasting not away before
The ebb and flow of everlasting years.
All join the stately and majestic march
Of one progression, closing in its ranks
The living and the dead.
Within that grave
He left the life that slumbered, to return
And rest by her, the feverish conflict o'er.
The incense and the sacrifice of love
Were given; with folded arms and head inclined,
As one whose earthly lesson had been learned,
Slowly and reverently he passed on
His way toward the city's solitude.