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| I STOOD within the Grave’s o’ershadowing vault; | |
| Gloomy and damp it stretched its vast domain; | |
| Shades were its boundary, for my strained eye sought | |
| For other limit to its width in vain. | |
| |
| Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray, | 5 |
| And distant sound of living men and things; | |
| This, in th’ encount’ring darkness pass’d away, | |
| That, took the tone in which a mourner sings. | |
| |
| I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp, | |
| Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom | 10 |
| And feebly burning ’gainst the rolling damp, | |
| I bore it through the regions of the tomb. | |
| |
| Around me stretch’d the slumbers of the dead, | |
| Whereof the silence ach’d upon mine ear; | |
| More and more noiseless did I make my tread, | 15 |
| And yet its echoes chill’d my heart with fear. | |
| |
| The former men of every age and place, | |
| From all their wanderings gather’d round me lay; | |
| The dust of wither’d Empires did I trace, | |
| And stood ’mid generations pass’d away. | 20 |
| |
| I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire | |
| Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath; | |
| Whole armies whom a day beheld expire, | |
| By thousands swept into the arms of Death. | |
| |
| I saw the old world’s white and wave-swept bones, | 25 |
| A gaunt heap of creatures that had been; | |
| Far and confus’d the broken skeletons | |
| Lay strewn beyond mine eye’s remotest ken. | |
| |
| Death’s various shrines—the urn, the stone, the lamp— | |
| Were scattered round, confus’d, amid the dead; | 30 |
| Symbols and types were mould’ring in the damp, | |
| Their shapes were waning, and their meaning fled. | |
| |
| Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe, | |
| Were character’d on tablets Time had swept; | |
| And deep were half their letters hid below | 35 |
| The thick small dust of those they once had wept. | |
| |
| No hand was there to wipe the dust away; | |
| No reader of the writing trac’d beneath; | |
| No spirit sitting by its form of clay; | |
| No sigh nor sound from all the heaps of death. | 40 |
| |
| One place alone had ceased to hold its prey; | |
| A form had press’d it and was there no more; | |
| The garments of the grave beside it lay, | |
| Where once they wrapp’d him on the rocky floor. | |
| |
| He only with returning footsteps broke | 45 |
| Th’ eternal calm wherewith the tomb was bound; | |
| Among the sleeping dead alone He woke, | |
| And bless’d with outstretch’d hands the host around. | |
| |
| Well is it that such blessing hovers here, | |
| To soothe each sad survivor of the throng | 50 |
| Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere, | |
| And pour their woe the loaded air along. | |
| |
| They to the verge have follow’d what they love, | |
| And on th’ insuperable threshold stand; | |
| With cherish’d names its speechless calm reprove, | 55 |
| And stretch in the abyss their ungrasp’d hand. | |
| |
| But vainly there the mourners seek relief | |
| From silenc’d voice and shapes Decay has swept, | |
| Till Death himself shall medicine their grief, | |
| Closing their eyes by those o’er whom they wept. | 60 |
| |
| All that have died, the earth’s whole race, repose | |
| Where Death collects his treasures, heap on heap; | |
| O’er each one’s busy day the night shades close, | |
| Its actors, sufferers, schools, kings, armies—sleep. | |
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