ous wrinkle on the brow
Of her Most Sweet Imperious Majesty.
Full many a problem his statecraft had solved--
How strangle treason, how soothe turbulent peers,
How foil the Pope and Spain, how pay the Fleet--
Mere temporal matters; but this business smelt
Strongly of brimstone. Bring back vanished folk!
That could not Master Cecil an he would.

The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.
Dark were the days that came to Wyndham Towers
With that grim secret rusting in its heart.
On the sea's side along the fissured wall
The lichen spread in patches of dull gold
Up to the battlements, at times assailed
By sheeted ghosts of mist blown from the sea,
Now by the whistling arrows of the sleet
Pelted, and thrice of lightning scorched and seamed,
But stoutly held from dreary year to year
By legions of most venerable rooks,
Shrill black-robed prelates of the fighting sort.
In the wide moat, run dry with summer droughts
Great scarlet poppies lay in drifts and heaps,
Like bodies fall'n there in some vain assault.
Within, decay and dolor had their court--
Dolor, decay, and silence, lords of all.
From room to room the wind went shuddering
On some vague endless quest; now pausing here
To lift an arras, and then hurrying on,
To some fresh clue, belike! The sharp-nosed mouse
Through joist and floor discreetly gnawed her way,
And for her glossy young a lodging made
In a cracked corselet that once held a heart.
The meditative spider undisturbed
Wove his gray tapestry from sill to sill.
Over the transom the stone eagle drooped,
With one wing gone, in most dejected state
Moulting his feathers. A blue poisonous vine,
Whose lucent berry, hard as Indian jade,
No squirrel tried his tooth on, June by June
On the south hill-slope festered in the sun.
Man's foot came not there. It was haunted ground.

The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.
An oak stood where an acorn tumbled once,
Ages ago, and all the world was strange.
Now, in that year King Charles the Second left
Forever the soft arms of Mistress Gwynn
And wrapt him in that marble where he lies,
The moulder'd pile with its entombed Crime
Passed to the keep of a brave new-fledged lord,
Who, liking much the sane and wholesom