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Of Night's wild coursers, fierce and black,
Streamed over the star-paven track:
Or it may be this voiceless leven,
Launched from the unseen clouds of heaven,
Are bolts by spirit-tempests hurled
Into a purgatorial world
Or they may be in the fields of blue
Offsprings of nameless damps and dew,--
Celestial will-o'-wisps at play,
Leading benighted souls astray

Midnight was near. With a look divine
He saw the maid at her chamber shrine.
Two little tapers with flaming wicks
Burned beside a crucifix.
And while she prayed, it seemed
Over her face a splendour beamed,--
A light of purity and grace
Shed from the suffering Saviour's face.

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Her angel look was upward turned;
Her white breast heaved as if it yearned
To breathe her very soul away
In a prayer which words had failed to say.
Her upturned face--her fallen hair,
Her hands clasped on her bosom fair,
Her heaving breast but half concealed,
The fulness of her prayer revealed.

As the watcher gazed, he felt his brain
Branded with a forgotten pain;
And thoughts he had deemed frozen, dead,
Warmed snakelike, by his heart's flame fed,
Till thus the voice of a demon guest
With scornful laugh its joy expressed:--
"The hawk looks down on the ring-dove's nest;
He loves her meek voice and her smooth meek breast!
And the beautiful bird shall still be as meek
When her red heart quivers in the falcon's beak!"

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"Horrible fiend!" he cried, in pain,
"Back to your baneful den again!
Oh, Death, stand by me in this hour,
And strike me ere the fiend have power!
Have I not, with a terrible oath
On the breast of the dying sworn my troth?
Did I not swear when Death was at strife,
In the white dome of her bosom, with life,--
Though I had wronged her living trust,--
To be true, ay, as true as the tomb to her dust?
For this she forgave the great wrong I had wrought,
And mingled my name in her last sweet thought,
And promised that, in an hour of fear,
Her soul should be as a guardian near!"

As he spoke, the great tears swam over his gaze,
Till the white moon reeled in delirious haze,
And the stars were unsteady as gust-winnowed chaff--
Still his innermost soul heard the mad demon laugh.

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"Look! look again!" Thus cried the fiend,
"One look before the vision is screened--
Oh, never was Pariah so fair to the sight!
Oh, never such beauty pulsed love through the night!"

But still the pale man, like some martyr who dies,
Looked into the sky with fixed agonized eyes,
Sighing, "Ida! dear Ida! The hour of fear,
Like a tiger in wait for its prey, crouches here!
I see its red eyes and I feel its hot breath:--
Come forth, thou sweet friend, from the gateways of Death!
Press me close--side to side--soul to soul--mind to mind--
Or lead through that path thou too early didst find!"

As he spoke, soft lips, like sunshine warm,
Kissed from his brow the late alarm--
Pale delicate arms his neck caressed,
And the head of a spirit was laid on his breast!

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The silken hair that fell unfurled
Still gleamed with the hue of another world:
So soft were her tresses, each breath of the gale
Caressed them in air like a gossamer veil;
And her garments still breathed of ethereal dew
In fields where no mortal has ever passed through.

Then the fiend exclaimed with louder jeers--
While the spirit pressed her hands to her ears,
And gazed with that imploring look
Which only a demon's eye could brook--
"This hour, thou wretched ghost! is thine--
But the next and the next shall all be mine!
The cup is brewing which he shall quaff,
While the angels shall weep and the fiends shall laugh!
Then thou shalt be scourged away with scorn
Into the outer dark forlorn,
And a mortal head usurp the breast
Which late thy phantom cheek has prest!

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Blood warms to blood--dust cleaves to dust--
And in that hour depart thou must,
Thou dead leaf on a midnight gust!"

Then even as a pale dead leaf
Still clinging where its hour is brief,
The spirit-lady in her grief
Shuddered and sighed, as if even now
The wind was plucking her from the bough.

"O Roland!" she cried, "there's one hour of dread,
Blackening like that cloud o'erhead;
A bitter wind is rising fast,
Like this which brings the ocean blast!"
"It shall not be!" the bold man cried;
"No wind shall bear thee from my side!
Let us descend to the altar shrine,
And kneel before the cross divine.
'Tis an altar by repentance built,
In memory of my former guilt,

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That a daily prayer might there be made,
To ransom thy departed shade."

Then they descended. The east winds came,
Trampling the sea into phosphor flame,
Which filled the black arch of the night
With sheeted flashings of spectral light.
And every maniac ocean-gust
Scattered the feathery foam, like dust,
Into the air--again and again
Flinging on the window pane
White briny flakes, in rage and spite,
As if to drown the altar light.


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IV.
STILL leaning on her lover's breast,
The spirit thus her crime confessed:--

"O Roland! from too much loving thee,
From fear thou wert not wholly mine,
My lips partook of misery,
And left for thee that bitter wine
Pressed in the dark from wo's black vine!

"I drained the cup that kills with sleep,
And pillowed my head on the breast of Death:
He closed the lids that ceased to weep,
And kissed the lips at their latest breath!
That moment I had untimely birth
Out of the chrysalis of earth!

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Then I saw that by the horrible deed
The chain was sundered, yet I was not freed;
I had burst away from a windowed cell
Into a dungeon unfathomable--
Into utter night--where I could only hear
The sighing of cold phantoms near!
I shrank with dread; but soon I knew
They also shrank with dread from me;
And presently I began to see
Thin shapes of such a ghastly hue
That sudden agues thrilled me through!

"Some bore in their hands, as sign of guilt,
Keen poinards crimson to the hilt,
Which, ever and anon, in wild despair
They struck into their breasts of air:
Some pressed to their pale lips empty vials
Till frenzied with their fruitless trials:
Some with their faces to the sky,
Walked ever searching for a beam:

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Some leaped from shadowy turrets high, 
And fell, as in a nightmare dream,
Halfway, and stopped, as some mad rill,
That leaps from the top of an alpine hill,
Ere it reaches the rocks it hoped to win,
Is borne away in a vapour thin:
Some plunged them into counterfeit pools--
Into water that neither drowns nor cools
The horrible fever that burns the brain,
Then climbed despairing to plunge again:
And there were lovers together clasped,
O'er fumeless brazures, who sighed and gasped,
Staring wonder in each other's eye,
And tantalized that they did not die.

"Then as I passed, with marvelling stare
They gazed, forgetting their own despair.
Oh, horrible! their eyes did gloat
Upon me, till at my ashen throat

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I felt the fiery viper thirst
Which ever in that dry air is nurst.
And ere I was aware
I had raised the cup it was mine to bear:
My pale lips cleaved to the goblet dim,
And found but dust on the heated rim;
And then I knew--oh, misery!--
It was the same I had pledged to thee--
To absent thee, and to present Death,
Pledged and drained at one long-drawn breath--
Drained to the dregs! Then a hot wind sighed
Close in my ear--"THOU SUICIDE!"
And those two words flew
Into my heart, and pierced it through;
And my eyes grew blind with pain
As a serpent which, with rage insane,
Strikes himself with venomed fangs,
And writhes in the dust with self-dealt pangs.--
Then in my agony's wild excess
I partly swooned, and the pain grew less;

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While a form, not all devoid of kindness,
Seemed leaning o'er me in my blindness;
And whispered in my aching ear
Words which then were sweet to hear.

"'Hast thou no friend?' the spirit said,
'Who would rejoice wert thou not dead?
Who in his heart would call thee back
Into the world's green, visible track?
If such an one there be,
Whose soul yearns constantly for thee,
Hearken, and when his voice is heard
Breathing one recalling word,
Arise and hasten, the veil is then
Lifted, and thou mayst return again!
And it shall be thy fate, perchance,
To see the long dull years advance,
And still a bloodless ghost to be
For many a weary century,

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When all whom thou hast loved are fled
Into the regions overhead.
Then drearier far that world will be,
With its homes and haunts reminding thee
Of the loved and lost, than even this,
Where the vampire Pain enthronéd is.
But be thou ever wary and wise,
Gazing with unsleeping eyes,
And thou, perchance, shalt find ere long
Some spirit, racked with sin or wrong,
A-weary of Life's daily goad
And sinking under her dusty load,
Who, with rash and desperate hand,
Is about to sever the mortal band
Which binds her down, as once didst thou,
To be the shadow which thou art now.
At such an hour be thou then near,
And when the spirit shall disappear,
And the deserted form
Lies beside thee, silent, warm,

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Like a suit of mail in hot disdain
Discarded on a battle plain;
Don thou that heated armour then,
And strive with the striving world again!
And through long struggling it may be,
Thou mayst regain thy liberty."

"Thus spake the spirit. Then it seemed
A sudden light within me beamed;
And I arose and earthward sped
With a cautious, noiseless tread,
Hearkening ever for that voice
To make my phantom heart rejoice.

"Through fields of twilight first I passed,
Then through a sunset--till at last
I heard the roar
Of ocean jargoning with the shore,--
The sea-like voice of Humanity,
And the tongue-like shouting of the sea!

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Then as the night's wide track
Under my feet rolled dim and black,
I heard the voice which summoned me,
'Ida!' it cried, and I came to thee!"


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V.
WHO that has heard the billows roar
On the rocky bastions of the shore,
Could restrain the sense of sublimity
Which drew him to overlook the sea--
One sea with the terror of many seas!
And held him with the mysterious law
Of wonder and soul-pervading awe,
And sympathy, the child of these?

Out to the foamy balcony, 
Where the phosphor light
And the black of the night
Struggled in gloomy rivalry,
Strode Roland--his cloak and hair
Twitched by the briny hands of air, 

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And all his dusk garb instantly
Made white with the insult of the sea!

Burning through the eastern dark,
At the bow of a perilous bark,
Rising with alternate leap
Out of the valleys of the deep,
He beheld a crimson light
Driving shoreward through the night,--
Watched it as the lurid flame
Straight to its destruction came!
On it drove before the gale,
With empty mast or shivered sail;
And Roland shuddered in his fear
As he saw it neither tack nor veer,
And trembled to think of a crowded deck
Dashed at his feet a shapeless wreck!

A shock! A shriek! The light was drowned!
And the billows leaped with a higher bound!

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And the skyward spray the instant after
Was stunned with the ocean's scornful laughter!

Then, bewildered with pain and fright,
Roland descended the stormy height,
Finding his way by the phosphor light,
To seek amid the wild uproar
The drowning bodies thrown on shore.
Suddenly at his feet a form
Lay like an offering from the storm!
White as a stranded wreath of foam,
White as a ghost from its charnel home, 
It lay where the gust with blinding flight
Strove to hide the thing from sight,
Like a maniac murderer, to and fro
Raving and flinging the scattering snow
Over the victim that mocks his despair
With its unveiled face and tell-tale stare!
A moment the brave man's heart recoiled,
Then he lifted the body and upward toiled.


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VI.
IT was a sight both wild and dread
To see the living for the dead--
One stubborn and unaided form--
Battling with an ocean storm,--
Toiling up the jagged path,
Chased by the billows in their wrath,
Bearing the dripping shape away
Which the sea had deemed its prey.

Thus laden, Roland among the rocks
Strove upward mid the desperate shocks
Of gust and foam--climbing a track
As crooked as that on the tempest's wrack,
Where the arméd Thunder in his ire
Descends in a zigzag path of fire:

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The long black hair
Of the drownéd form he strove to bear,
Flashed abroad on the wet sea air,
Wild as the tresses of Despair:
And he thought, as he gazed on the drooping head
Where the writhing locks were so wildly spread,
Of the twisted horrors Medusa wore--
And a shudder pierced him to the core.

But now he heard, or deemed he heard,
The sound of that most piteous word,
That only word the full heart knows
To syllable its joys and woes,--
A sigh! Like a night-bird sweeping near,
Its soft wing fluttered past his ear,
And he felt the heave of the rounded breast
Which close against his own was prest:
Then through his frame he took new strength,
And with upward toiling gained at length

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The gusty height! A moment there,
While the lightning lent its sheeted glare,
That group stood in the misty air
Like statues on a terrace high,
Relieved on a dusky wall of sky.


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VII.
INTO the care of a gray-haired crone,
The sybil who tended his dull hearth-stone,
He yielded the body. A couch was spread,
And the lady was laid as she were not dead;
And the dame from off the swooning face
Smoothed the wet locks into their place;
And Roland, when the salt sea-spray
Which blurred his vision was cleared away,
Holding a white torch, bent to trace
The features of that sleeping face.
His heart stood still!
His blood ran chill!
His wide eyes could not gaze their fill!
And as his marvelling face was drawn
Nearer and nearer to stare thereon--

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Slowly--slowly as a veil
Lifted from a phantom's visage pale,
The lady's delicate lids were raised,
And in Roland's face the soft orbs gazed
With all that touching tenderness
Which only loving eyes express.

He had clasped the ghost of his beloved,
And not a tremor in his soul was moved,--
From lips of air had taken the kiss
With not a fear to mar the bliss,--
And heard what the threatening demon said,
With a pang of pain but not of dread!

But now an icy horror stole
Through the deepest depths of his inmost soul;
For here indeed was the risen dead
For whom the funeral tears were shed!
A spectre of dust!--a ghost of clay!--
That lived when the spirit had passed away.

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He trembled, but could not move or speak:
He had gazed in those eyes till his will was weak.

Then the lady sighed, and her bosom heaved,
And she faintly smiled as her heart was grieved;
While the thought of pain which shadowed her brow
Said, "Roland, ah! Roland, thou lovest me not now!"
Then a great tear stole from under her lid,
And rebukingly over her white cheek slid:
Then Roland cried as he clasped her hand,
"'Tis a dream that I cannot understand!
Forgive me, dear Ida, if even I seem
To wrong thy sweet shade in the dark of a dream!"

" Oh, joy! Thou hast called me 'dear Ida,'" she cried,
And she lovingly drew him more close to her side.
That voice--'twas the same he had heard in gone days,
While she poured in his eyes as of old her soft gaze.

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Then she sighed--"Ah! dear Roland, a vision it seems?--
To me 'tis the sweetest of all waking dreams!
And let me recount in this hour of bliss
How I fled out of the past into this,
Escaping from Death's black precipice."


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VIII.
"FAR back in that dark desperate hour,
When the swart mandragore had power,--
While the suicidal draught, like flame,
Through all the galleries of my frame
Spread its malignant fire--even then
I repented and prayed for life again--
Not from the torture; but that I knew,
When it seemed too late, that thou wert true.

"And then I swooned, and heard the tread 
Of muffled feet--while sad hearts said, 
In sighs and whispers--'She is dead! is dead!'
And then I knew,--oh, wo was me!--
That word was a shaft of pain to thee,

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A shaft which I had winged with flame
And sped--and yet could not reclaim!
I saw thy high soul with the blow
Struck to the dreary plains of wo,
Yet struggling in its fall, as when
An eagle, sailing with sunward ken,
Receives from the heartless archer's bow
The envious arrow winged from below.

"Then I felt thy hasty farewell kiss,--
A touch of mingled torture and bliss;
And my soul within me writhed with pain
That I could not return that kiss again.
And then you fled! I heard the door
Swing loud behind--and heard no more.
My very soul then swooned--and all
Was blacker than midnight's starless pall.
And more I know not--till a long cool breath
Came into my breast and chased out Death--
Or that dark sleep which did counterfeit

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Black Death so well, that I scarcely yet
Can realize the miracle
Which finds me freed from his dreamless spell.

"Then I awoke and saw the room
Tricked out with all the pompous gloom
Of funeral weeds--the air was sick
With incense fumes suspended thick
And blue, as at morn o'er a stagnant lake
Swings the venomous mist ere the winds awake.
There I saw two tapers with fiendish glare
Burning in the ghastly air;
And my breast with horrible pain was weighed,
As if by the weight of a black dream made.
I found it was a cross of gold
Which lay on my bosom so heavy and cold--
A cross entwined with lily-bells,
And framed in a wreath of immortelles.
A garland of flame--a cross of fire--
And I outstretched on a martyr's pyre

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Had been less terrible!--So at last,
By struggling I grew strong, and cast
These emblems of death from off my breast,
And, breathing, felt no more opprest.

"Then you should have heard the shriek
Of Death's stout wardress!--Pale and weak,
She reeled and tottered beyond the door,
And fell in a fit on the marble floor.
She awoke a maniac--her hair turned gray--
And a maniac she goes to this very day.

"Then the household and the priest came in--
The priest in his robe as black as sin!--
All shuddered and shrank; till I rose and smiled,
When they rushed to my side with wonder wild,
And cried, in their mingled joy and dread--
'She lives! Our Ida is not dead!'


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IX.
"DAYS past, and daily I asked for thee,
Till at last they pointed over the sea,
And said, in the madness of thy despair
Thy bark had followed the red sun there.
For hours they had watched the westward sail
Growing in the distance pale,
And sinking till beyond the line
Of the flaming, sunset-gilded brine 
It set, like a star,--and never more
Came tidings of that bark to shore.

"Then with a grief too great for speech,
I wandered daily to the beach

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With one companion gray and old,
A reverend friar--who hourly told
His 'Aves' as we walked the sand--
And the pious tears, on his sunbrown hand
His old eyes dropped, outcounted the beads
As he thought of my sorrow! My poor heart bleeds
That these tearful eyes shall no more win
A sight of that saintly Capuchin!

"At last we found
A little shallop westward bound;
The daintiest thing that ever yet
Was on the treacherous ocean set.
Under the prow we read her name
Written in ciphers of golden flame,--
'THE FIRE BEARER.' Each letter did make,
The semblance of a twisted snake,--
One with the other all intervolved,
Like a riddle that is slowly solved.


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"What ails the dame? What thus can make
Her eyes so wide and her limbs to quake?"
The crone replied, with a look of awe,
"Forgive me, lady, I thought I saw--
My sight is dim,--
'Twas a foolish whim,--
But I thought I saw a fiery snake,
A little streak of flame just there
Writhing through your tangled hair!"
The lady smiled, and gathered in
Her tresses betwixt her breast and chin;
And thus pursued the delirious theme,
While Roland listened like one in a dream.

"So near the shallop tacked and sailed,
That in a desperate moment I hailed
The skipper, who leaned against the helm,
Looking the lord of the watery realm.
Round went the rudder,--the sail went round;
And the light bark neared like a leaping hound;

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Then, seeing what I had done, I sank
And swooned on the breast of the dear old monk!

"Then, half-awaking, I felt the motion
Beneath me of a summer ocean,
And dimly heard a voice of glee
Singing some ballad about the sea!--
'Twas the skipper's voice, as the helm he prest,
Heading the shallop out to the west!

"The Capuchin was at my side,
Or else for very fear I had died.
There we sat on deck, in the breezy shade
By the one tall lateen canvas made,--
Still flashing on in our track of foam
When the venturous sea-gull turned for home.

"Thus dreamily sitting, for many a day
Under the bow we heard the spray,

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And watched our backward path of white,
And gazed on its liquid fire by night.

"Under us eastward the sea went by,
Over us westward went the sky--
The sun and the moon and those silver barks,
Those soul-freighted celestial arks,
The starry fleets of the shoreless night,
Were the only things that surpassed our flight!
As a swallow chases the summer, we sped,
Chasing the days that before us fled."


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Page 66
X.
"THEN came the calm--we called it so--
But the skipper knew, as now we know,
That it was only the hungry Storm,
Crouching back with his awful form,
The better that he might spring and light
Down on the unsuspecting night!

"The sail was furled,--the hatch made fast,--
And the friar and I sat close to the mast,
Then came the dark and the roaring gale,
And we sailed as an autumn leaf might sail,
Blown by a loud-tornado gust--
And the spray was like a blinding dust.

"Then to the shivering mast we clung
Still closer--while the friar's tongue
