“Ah, speak! am I so frightful then? 
  I live; though they call it death;
I am only cold—­say dear again”—­
  But scarce could he heave a breath;
The air felt dank, like a frozen fen,
  And he a half-conscious wraith.

“Ah, save me!” once more, with a hopeless cry,
  That entered his heart, and lay;
But sunshine and warmth and rosiness vie
  With coldness and moonlight and grey. 
He spoke not.  She moved not; yet to his eye,
  She stood three paces away.

She spoke no more.  Grief on her face
  Beauty had almost slain. 
With a feverous vision’s unseen pace
  She had flitted away again;
And stood, with a last dumb prayer for grace,
  By the window that clanged with rain.

He stood; he stared.  She had vanished quite. 
  The loud wind sank to a sigh;
Grey faces without paled the face of night,
  As they swept the window by;
And each, as it passed, pressed a cheek of fright
  To the glass, with a staring eye.

And over, afar from over the deep,
  Came a long and cadenced wail;
It rose, and it sank, and it rose on the steep
  Of the billows that build the gale. 
It ceased; but on in his bosom creep
  Low echoes that tell the tale.

He opened his lattice, and saw afar,
  Over the western sea,
Across the spears of a sparkling star,
  A moony vapour flee;
And he thought, with a pang that he could not bar,
  The lady it might be.

He turned and looked into the room;
  And lo! it was cheerless and bare;
Empty and drear as a hopeless tomb,—­
  And the lady was not there;
Yet the fire and the lamp drove out the gloom,
  As he had driven the fair.

And up in the manhood of his breast,
  Sprang a storm of passion and shame;
It tore the pride of his fancied best
  In a thousand shreds of blame;
It threw to the ground his ancient crest,
  And puffed at his ancient name.

He had turned a lady, and lightly clad,
  Out in the stormy cold. 
Was she a ghost?—­Divinely sad
  Are the guests of Hades old. 
A wandering ghost?  Oh! terror bad,
  That refused an earthly fold!

And sorrow for her his shame’s regret
  Into humility wept;
He knelt and he kissed the footprints wet,
  And the track by her thin robe swept;
He sat in her chair, all ice-cold yet,
  And moaned until he slept.

He woke at dawn.  The flaming sun
  Laughed at the bye-gone dark. 
“I am glad,” he said, “that the night is done,
  And the dream slain by the lark.” 
And the eye was all, until the gun
  That boomed at the sun-set—­hark!

And then, with a sudden invading blast,
  He knew that it was no dream. 
And all the night belief held fast,
  Till thinned by the morning beam. 
Thus radiant mornings and pale nights passed
  On the backward-flowing stream.