hooded shapes of death
Gaunt and grey, cruel and blind,
Stealing softly as a breath
Through the woods that loured behind
The City; hooded shapes of fear
Slowly, slowly stealing near;
While all the gloom that round them rolled
With intertwisting coils grew cold.
And there with leer and gap-toothed grin
Many a gaunt ancestral Sin
With clutching fingers, white and thin,
Strove to put the boughs aside;
And still before them all would glide
Down the wavering moon-white track
One lissom figure, clad in black;
Who wept at mirth and mocked at pain
And murmured a song of the wind and the rain;
His laugh was wild with a secret grief;
His eyes were deep like woodland pools;
And, once and again, as his face drew near
In a rosy gloaming of eglantere,
All the ghosts that gathered there
Bowed together, naming his name:
Lead us, ah thou _Shadow of a Leaf_,
Child and master of all our shame,
Fool of Doubt and King of Fools.

Now the linnet had ended his evensong,
And the lark dropt down from his last wild ditty
And ruffled his wings and his speckled breast
Blossomwise over his June-sweet nest;
While winging wistfully into the West
As a fallen petal is wafted along
The last white sea-mew sought for rest;
And, over the gleaming heave and swell
Of the swinging seas,
Drowsily breathed the dreaming breeze.
Then, suddenly, out of the Valley of Gloom
That clove the cliffs behind the City,
Out of the silent forest of Doom
That clothed the valley with clouds of fear
Swelled the boom of a distant bell
Once, and the towers of the City of Pain
Echoed it, without hope or pity.
The tale of that tolling who can tell?
That dark old music who shall declare?
Who shall interpret the song of the bell?

_Is it nothing to you, all ye that hear_,
Sorrowed the bell, _Is it nothing to you?
Is it nothing to you?_ the shore-wind cried,
_Is it nothing to you?_ the cliffs replied.
But the low light laughed and the skies were blue,
And this was only the song of the bell.

X

ANWYL

A darkened easement in a darker room
Was all his home, whence weary and bowed and white
He watched across the slowly gathering gloom
The slowly westering light.

Bitterness in his heavy-clouded eyes,
Bitterness as of heav