g wildly with wind and hail._

The night is wild with rain and sleet.
Each loose-warped casement claps and groans.
I hear the plangent forest beat
The tempest with long blatant moans
As of despair, defeat.

And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems that some mesmeric charm
Hangs over all.--Why, even the mouse,
That gnawed, has come to harm.

And in the silence, stolen o'er
All things, I strangely seem to fear
Myself--that, opening yon door,
I'd find my dead self drawing near,
With face that once I wore.

The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts.
The flue moans--'tis a gorgon throat
Of wailing winds. Ancestral dusts,--
That yonder Indian war-gear coat
With gray and spectral crusts,--

Are trembled down.--Or can it be,
That he who wore it in the dance,
Or battle, now fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins? And shakes his lance
And warrior plume at me?--

Mere fancy!--Yet those curtains toss
Mysteriously as if some dark
Hand moved them.--And I'd fear to cross
The shadow there where lies that spark--
A glow-worm sunk in moss.

Outside 'twere better!--Yes, I yearn
To walk the waste where sway and dip
The dark December boughs--where burn
Some late last leaves, that drip and drip
No matter where you turn.

Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints--but the blind
Night there, tho' like the frown of God,
Presents no phantoms to the mind,
Like these that have o'erawed.--

The months I count: how long it seems
Since summer! summer, when with her,
There on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the flickering lightning stir
In heavens gray as dreams.

When all the west, a sheet of gold,
Flared,--like some Titan's opened forge,--
With storm; revealing manifold
Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,
Where thunder torrents rolled.

Then came the wind; again, again
The lightning lit the world--and how
The tempest roared with rushing rain!...
We could not read.--Where is it now,
That tale of Charlemagne?

That old romance, ah me! that we
Were reading? till we heard the plunge
Of summer thunder sullenly,
And left to watch the lightning lunge,
And winds bend down each tree.--

That summer! how it built us there
A world of love and necromance!
A spirit-world, where all was fair;
An island, sleeping in a trance
Of lilied ligh