Great Heaven! methought, how strange a doom to share. 
  Would I may never bear
  Inevitable darkness after me
(Darkness endowed with drawings strong,
  And shadowy hands that cling unendingly),
  Nor feel that phantom-wings behind me sweep,
As she feels night pursuing through the long
  Illimitable reaches of “the vasty deep.”

* * * * *

God save you, gentlefolks.  There was a man
  Who lay awake at midnight on his bed,
Watching the spiral flame that feeding ran
  Among the logs upon his hearth, and shed
A comfortable glow, both warm and dim,
On crimson curtains that encompassed him.

Right stately was his chamber, soft and white
  The pillow, and his quilt was eider-down. 
What mattered it to him though all that night
  The desolate driving cloud might lower and frown,
And winds were up the eddying sleet to chase,
That drave and drave and found no settling-place?

What mattered it that leafless trees might rock,
  Or snow might drift athwart his window-pane? 
He bare a charmed life against their shock,
  Secure from cold, hunger, and weather stain;
Fixed in his right, and born to good estate,
From common ills set by and separate.

From work and want and fear of want apart,
  This man (men called him Justice Wilvermore),—­
This man had comforted his cheerful heart
  With all that it desired from every shore. 
He had a right,—­the right of gold is strong,—­
He stood upon his right his whole life long.

Custom makes all things easy, and content
  Is careless, therefore on the storm and cold,
As he lay waking, never a thought he spent,
  Albeit across the vale beneath the wold,
Along a reedy mere that frozen lay,
A range of sordid hovels stretched away.

What cause had he to think on them, forsooth? 
  What cause that night beyond another night? 
He was familiar even from his youth
  With their long ruin and their evil plight. 
The wintry wind would search them like a scout,
The water froze within as freely as without.

He think upon them?  No!  They were forlorn,
  So were the cowering inmates whom they held;
A thriftless tribe, to shifts and leanness born,
  Ever complaining:  infancy or eld
Alike.  But there was rent, or long ago
Those cottage roofs had met with overthrow.

For this they stood; and what his thoughts might be
  That winter night, I know not; but I know
That, while the creeping flame fed silently
  And cast upon his bed a crimson glow,
The Justice slept, and shortly in his sleep
He fell to dreaming, and his dream was deep.

He dreamed that over him a shadow came;
  And when he looked to find the cause, behold
Some person knelt between him and the flame:—­
  A cowering figure of one frail and old,—­
A woman; and she prayed as he descried,
And spread her feeble hands, and shook and sighed.