| |
| THERE is a stillness on the night; | |
| Glimmers the ghastly moonshine white | |
| On Learmonth’s woods and Leader’s streams, | |
| Till Earth looks like a land of dreams: | |
| Up in the arch of heaven afar, | 5 |
| Receded looks each little star, | |
| And meteor flashes faintly play | |
| By fits along the Milky Way. | |
| Upon me in this eerie hush, | |
| A thousand wild emotions rush, | 10 |
| As, gazing spellbound o’er the scene, | |
| Beside thy haunted walls I lean, | |
| Gray Ercildoune, and feel the Past | |
| His charméd mantle o’er me cast; | |
| Visions, and thoughts unknown to Day, | 15 |
| Bear o’er the fancy wizard sway, | |
| And call up the traditions told | |
| Of him who sojourned here of old. | |
| |
| What stirs within thee? ’T is the owl | |
| Nursing amid thy chambers foul | 20 |
| Her impish brood; the nettles rank | |
| Are seeding on thy wild-flower bank; | |
| The hemlock and the dock declare | |
| In rankness dark their mastery there; | |
| And all around thee speaks the sway | 25 |
| Of desolation and decay. | |
| In outlines dark the shadows fall | |
| Of each grotesque and crumbling wall. | |
| Extinguished long hath been the strife | |
| Within thy courts of human life. | 30 |
| The rustic, with averted eye, | |
| At fall of evening hurries by, | |
| And lists to hear, and thinks he hears, | |
| Strange sounds,—the offspring of his fears; | |
| And wave of bough, and waters’ gleam, | 35 |
| Not what they are, but what they seem | |
| To be, are by the mind believed, | |
| Which seeks not to be undeceived. | |
| Thou scowlest like a spectre vast | |
| Of silent generations past, | 40 |
| And all about thee wears a gloom | |
| Of something sterner than the tomb. | |
| For thee, ’t is said, dire forms molest, | |
| That cannot die, or will not rest. | |
| |
| Backward my spirit to the sway | 45 |
| Of shadowy Eld is led away, | |
| When underneath thine ample dome | |
| Thomas the Rhymer made his home, | |
| The wondrous poet-seer, whose name, | |
| Still floating on the breath of fame, | 50 |
| Hath overpast five hundred years, | |
| Yet fresh as yesterday appears, | |
| With spells to arm the winter’s tale, | |
| And make the listener’s cheek grow pale. | |
| Secluded here in chamber lone, | 55 |
| Often the light of genius shone | |
| Upon his pictured page, which told | |
| Of Tristrem brave, and fair Isolde, | |
| And how their faith was sorely tried, | |
| And how they would not change, but died | 60 |
| Together, and the fatal stroke | |
| Which stilled one heart, the other broke; | |
| And here, on midnight couch reclined, | |
| Hearkened his gifted ear the wind | |
| Of dark Futurity, as on | 65 |
| Through shadowy ages swept the tone, | |
| A mystic voice, whose murmurs told | |
| The acts of eras yet unrolled; | |
| While Leader sang a low wild tune, | |
| And redly set the waning moon, | 70 |
| Amid the West’s pavilion grim, | |
| O’er Soltra’s mountains vast and dim. | |
| |
| His mantle dark, his bosom bare, | |
| His floating eyes and flowing hair, | |
| Methinks the visioned bard I see | 75 |
| Beneath the mystic Eildon Tree, | |
| Piercing the mazy depths of Time, | |
| And weaving thence prophetic rhyme; | |
| Beings around him that had birth | |
| Neither in heaven nor yet on earth; | 80 |
| And at his feet the broken law | |
| Of Nature, through whose chinks he saw. * * * * * | |
| |
