There the dungeon clasped its victim,
      And a stupor chained his breath. 
    Till the torture woke his senses,
      With a sharper touch than death.

    Now, through all the vacant silence,
      Reign the darkness and the damp,
    Broken only when the traveller
      Comes to gaze, with guide and lamp.

    All about him, black and shattered,
      Eaten with the rust of Time,
    Lie the fearful signs and tokens
      Of an age when Law was Crime.

    And the guide, with grim precision,
      Tells the dismal tale once more,
    Tells to living men the tortures
      Living men have borne before.

    Well that speechless things, unconscious,
      Furnish forth that place of dread,
    Guiltless of the crimes they witnessed,
      Guiltless of the blood they shed;

    Else what direful lamentations,
      And what revelations dire,
    Ceaseless from their lips would echo,
      Tossed in memory’s penal fire.

    Even as we gaze, the fancy
      With a sudden life-gush warms,
    And, once more, the Torture Chamber,
      With its murderous tenants swarms.

    Yonder, through the narrow archway,
      Comes the culprit in the gloom,
    Falters on the fatal threshold—­
      Totters to the bloody doom.

    Here the executioner, lurking,
      Waits, with brutal thirst, his hour,
    Tool of bloodier men and bolder,
      Drunken with the dregs of power.

    There the careful leech sits patient,
      Watching pulse, and hue, and breath,
    Weighing life’s remaining scruples
      With the heavier chance of death.

    Eking out the little remnant,
      Lest the victim die too soon,
    And the torture of the morning
      Spare the torture of the noon.

    Here, behind the heavy grating,
      Sits the scribe, with pen and scroll,
    Waiting till the giant terror
      Bursts the secrets of the soul;

    Till the fearful tale of treason
      From the shrinking lips is wrung,
    Or the final, false confession
      Quivers from the trembling tongue;

    When the spirit, torn and tempted,
      Tried beyond its utmost scope,
    By an anguish past endurance,
      Madly cancels all its hope;

    From the pointed cliffs of torture,
      With its shrieks upon the air,
    Suicidal, plunging blindly,
      In the frenzy of despair!

* * * * *

    But the grey old tower is fading,
      Fades, in sunshine, from the eye,
    Like some evil bird whose pinion
      Dimly blots the distant sky.

    So the ancient gloom and terror
      Of the ages fade away,
    In the sunlight of the present,
      Of our better, purer day!