THE storm had raved its furious soul away;
O'er its wild ruins Twilight, spectral, gray,
Stole like a nun, 'midst wounded men and slain,
Walking the bounds of some fierce battle-plain.
The ghost of thunder muttered faintly by;
While down the uttermost spaces of the sky,
Just where the sunset's glimmering verge grew pale,
The baffled winds outbreathed their dying wail!
The sombre clouds that thronged a shadowy west
Writhed, as if tortured monsters of unrest,
Whose depths the keen sheet-lightnings rent apart,
To show what fiery torment throbbed at heart!
Where raged of late the war of elements dread,
Brooded a solemn silence overhead,
Through which, beyond the cloud-strewn, heavenly field,
The moon shone gory as a warrior's shield,
Dipped in the veins of many a vanquished foe;
Blood-red, I marked the wandering vapors flow
Vaguely about her, while her lurid light
Scared the vague vanguard of the shades of night;
Their banded hosts retreating, wild and dim,
In shattered cohorts o'er the horizon's rim:
Yet, the broad empire of those baleful beams
Heaved with strange shapes and hues of nightmare dreams!
Here, as from cloud-born Himalayas rolled,
I saw what seemed a cataract's rush of gold,
Hurled between shores of darkness, dense and dire,
Down to a seething mountain-lake of fire;
There, dismal catacombs, whose nether glooms,
Yawned, to reveal their loathsome place of tombs:
Caverns of mystic depth, whence bubbling came
The blue-tinged horror of sulphureous flame;
Fragments of castles, with fresh blood besprent,
Gaunt, ruined tower, and blasted battlement--
On which, flame-clad, and tottering to their fall,
Dark eyes of frenzy flashed o'er cope and wall!
With awful ocean-spaces, limitless, grand,
Where spectral billows lashed a viewless land;
Their mountainous floods a frowning zenith kissed,
But glimpsed, at times, 'twixt folds of phantom-mist,
I viewed, as faintly touched by muffled stars,
The semblance of dead forms, on shipwrecked spars
Whirled upward, and dead faces, a white spume
Smote to false life against that turbulent gloom,
Where mournful birds, on pinions gray or dun,
Circled, methought, o'er some half-perished sun,
Whose feeble lustre, faltering upward, flings
A sad-hued radiance round their pallid wings;
Yea! all fantastic shapes of terror, wrought
'Twixt errant fancy and dream-haunted thought,
Until I seemed with Dante's soul to fly,
Through new Infernos, shifted to--the sky!
