VI

Sweet was her face as song that sings of home;
  And filled our hearts with vague, suggestive spells
  Of pathos, as sad ocean fills its shells
With sympathetic moanings of its foam.

VII

She raised one hand and pointed silently,
  Then passed; her eyes, gaunt with a thirst unslaked,
  Were worlds of woe, where tears in torrents ached,
Yet never fell.  And like a winter sea,—­

VIII

Whose caverned crags are haunts of wreck and wrath,
  That house the condor pinions of the storm,—­
  My soul replied; and, weeping, arm in arm,
To’ards those dim hills, by that appointed path,

IX

We turned and went.  Arrived, we did discern
  How Beauty beckoned, white ’mid miles of flowers,
  Through which, behold, the amaranthine Hours
Like maidens went each holding up an urn;

X

Wherein, it seemed—­drained from long chalices
  Of those slim flow’rs—­they bore mysterious wine;
  A poppied vintage, full of sleep divine
And pale forgetting of all miseries.

XI

Then to my soul I said, “No longer weep. 
  Come, let us drink; for hateful is the sky,
  And earth is full of care, and life’s a lie. 
So let us drink; yea, let us drink and sleep.”

XII

Then from their brimming urns we drank sweet must,
  While, all around us, rose-crowned faces laughed
  Into our eyes; but hardly had we quaffed
When, one by one, these crumbled into dust.

XIII

And league on league the eminence of blooms,
  That flashed and billowed like a summer sea,
  Rolled out a waste of thorns and tombs; where bee
And butterfly and bird hung dead in looms

XIV

Of worm and spider.  And through tomb and brier,
  A thin wind, parched with thirsty dust and sand,
  Went wailing as if mourning some lost land
Of perished empire, Babylon or Tyre.

XV

Long, long with blistered feet we wandered in
  That land of ruins, through whose sky of brass
  Hate’s Harpy shrieked; and in whose iron grass
The Hydra hissed of undestroyable Sin.

XVI

And there at last, behold, the House of Doom,—­
  Red, as if Hell had glared it into life,
  Blood-red, and howling with incessant strife,—­
With burning battlements, towered in the gloom.

XVII