at-is-now contrasts in thought
With what-was-once, that bloom and bough
Can only help me to remember.

10

_He pauses before a deserted house by the roadside._

Through iron-weeds and roses
And ancient beech and oak,
Old porches it discloses
Above the weeds and roses,
The drizzling raindrops soak.

Neglected walks a-tangle
With dodder-strangled grass;
And every mildewed angle
Heaped with dead leaves that spangle
The paths that round it pass.

The creatures there that bury
And hide within its rooms,
And spidered closets--very
Dim with gray webs--will hurry
Out when the twilight glooms.

Owls roost in room and basement;
Bats haunt its hearth and porch,
And through some paneless casement
Flit, in the moon's enlacement,
Or firefly's twinkling torch.

There is a sense of frost here,
And gusts that sigh away.--
What was it that was lost here?
Long, long ago was lost here?--
Can anybody say?

My foot perhaps would startle
Some bird that mopes within;
Some owl above its portal,
That stares upon the mortal
As on a thing of sin.

The rutty road winds by it
This side the dusty toll.--
Why do I stop to eye it?
My heart can not deny it--
The house is like my soul.

11

_He proceeds on his way._

I bear a burden--look not therein!
Naught will you find but sorrow and sin;
Sorrow and sin that wend with me
Wherever I go. And misery,
A gaunt companion, a wretched bride,
Goes always with me, side by side.

Sick of myself and all the Earth,
I ask my soul now--is life worth
The little pleasure that we gain
For all our sorrow and our pain?
The love, to which we gave our best,
That turns a mockery and a jest?

12

_Among the twilight fields._

The things we love, the loveliest things we cherish,
Pass from us soonest, vanish utterly.
Dust are our deeds, and dust our dreams that perish
Ere we can say _they be_!

I have loved man and learned we are not brothers--
Within myself, perhaps, may lie the cause;--
Then set one woman high above all others,
And found her full of flaws.

Made unseen stars my keblahs of devotion;
Aspired to knowledge and remained a clod:
With heart and soul, led on by blind emotion,
The way to failure trod.

Chance, say, or fate that works through good and evil;
Or destiny, that nothing may retard,
That to some end, above life