ch bone as it crosses, it clinks and it clanks
Like the clapping of timber on timber.
The warder he laugh'd, though his laugh was not loud;
And the Fiend whisper'd to him--"Go, steal me the shroud
Of one of these skeleton dancers."

He has done it! and backward with terrified glance
To the sheltering door ran the warder;
As calm as before look'd the moon on the dance,
Which they footed in hideous order.
But one and another seceding at last,
Slipp'd on their white garments and onward they pass'd,
And the deeps of the churchyard were quiet.

Still, one of them stumbles and tumbles along,
And taps at each tomb that it seizes;
But 'tis none of its mates that has done it this wrong,
For it scents its grave-clothes in the breezes.
It shakes the tower gate, but _that_ drives it away,
For 'twas nail'd o'er with crosses--a goodly array--
And well was it so for the warder!

It must have its shroud--it must have it betimes--
The quaint Gothic carving it catches,
And upwards from story to story it climbs
And scrambles with leaps and with snatches.
Now woe to the warder, poor sinner, betides!
Like a long-legged spider the skeleton strides
From buttress to buttress, still upward!

The warder he shook, and the warder grew pale,
And gladly the shroud would have yielded!
The ghost had its clutch on the last iron rail
Which the top of the watch-turret shielded.
When the moon was obscured by the rush of a cloud,
ONE! thunder'd the bell, and unswathed by a shroud,
Down went the gaunt skeleton crashing!

* * * * *

A very pleasant piece of poetry to translate at midnight, as we did it,
with merely the assistance of a dying candle!

After this feast of horrors, something more fanciful may not come amiss.
Let us pass to a competition of flowers in the golden, or--if you will
have it so--the iron age of chivalry. The meditations of a captive
knight have been a cherished theme for poets in all ages. Richard the
Lion-heart of England, and James I. of Scotland, have left us, in no
mean verse, the records of their own experience. We all remember how
nobly and how well Felicia Hemans portrayed the agony of the crusader as
he saw, from the window of his prison, the bright array of his Christian
comrades defiling through the pass below. We shall now take a similar
poem of Goethe, but one in a different vein:--