all the pilot stood, but we heard him
Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope for stopping. Then,
turning,--
"This is the place where it happened," brokenly whispered the
pilot.
"Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time."
Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the
starlight,
Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the
engines,
And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.
Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward
Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.
All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows
Smote with a mystical sense of infinite sorrow upon us.

FORLORN.

I.

Red roses, in the slender vases burning,
Breathed all upon the air,--
The passion and the tenderness and yearning,
The waiting and the doubting and despair.

II.

Still with the music of her voice was haunted,
Through all its charmed rhymes,
The open book of such a one as chanted
The things he dreamed in old, old summer-times.

III.

The silvern chords of the piano trembled
Still with the music wrung
From them; the silence of the room dissembled
The closes of the songs that she had sung.

IV.

The languor of the crimson shawl's abasement,--
Lying without a stir
Upon the floor,--the absence at the casement,
The solitude and hush were full of her.

V.

Without, and going from the room, and never
Departing, did depart
Her steps; and one that came too late forever
Felt them go heavy o'er his broken heart.

VI.

And, sitting in the house's desolation,
He could not bear the gloom,
The vanishing encounter and evasion
Of things that were and were not in the room.

VII.

Through midnight streets he followed fleeting visions
Of faces and of forms;
He heard old tendernesses and derisions
Amid the sobs and cries of midnight storms.

VIII.

By midnight lamps, and from the darkness under
That lamps made at their feet,
He saw sweet eyes peer out in innocent wonder,
And sadly follow after him down the street.

IX.

The noonday crowds their restlessness obtruded
Between him and his quest;
At unseen corners jostled and eluded,
Against his hand her silken robes were pressed.

X.

Doors closed upon her; out