“There was I fix’d, I know not how,
    Condemn’d for untold years to stay: 
  Yet years were not;—­one dreadful Now
    Endured no change of night or day;
  The same mild evening’s sleepy ray
    Shone softly-solemn and serene,
  And all that time I gazed away,
   The setting sun’s sad rays were seen.

  “At length a moment’s sleep stole on,—­
    Again came my commission’d foes;
  Again through sea and land we’re gone,
    No peace, no respite, no repose: 
  Above the dark broad sea we rose,
    We ran through bleak and frozen land;
  I had no strength their strength t’ oppose,
    An infant in a giant’s hand.

  “They placed me where those streamers play,
    Those nimble beams of brilliant light;
  It would the stoutest heart dismay,
    To see, to feel, that dreadful sight: 
  So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,
    They pierced my frame with icy wound;
  And all that half-year’s polar night,
    Those dancing streamers wrapp’d me round

  “Slowly that darkness pass’d away,
    When down, upon the earth I fell,—­
  Some hurried sleep was mine by day;
   But, soon as toll’d the evening bell,
  They forced me on, where ever dwell
    Far-distant men in cities fair,
  Cities of whom no travellers tell,
    Nor feet but mine were wanderers there

  “Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,
    As on we hurry through the dark;
  The watch-light blinks as we go past,
   The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark;
  The watch-tower’s bell sounds shrill; and, hark! 
    The free wind blows—­we’ve left the town—­
  A wide sepulchral ground I mark,
    And on a tombstone place me down.

  “What monuments of mighty dead! 
    What tombs of various kind are found! 
  And stones erect their shadows shed
    On humble graves, with wickers bound;
  Some risen fresh, above the ground,
    Some level with the native clay: 
  What sleeping millions wait the sound,
    ‘Arise, ye dead, and come away!’

  Alas! they stay not for that call;
    Spare me this woe! ye demons, spare!—­
  They come! the shrouded shadows all,—­
    ’Tis more than mortal brain can bear;
  Rustling they rise, they sternly glare
    At man upheld by vital breath;
  Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare
    To join the shadowy troops of death!”

For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imaginings is sustained, and, it must be admitted, at a high level as regards diction.  The reader will note first how the impetuous flow of those visionary recollections generates a style in the main so lofty and so strong.  The poetic diction of the eighteenth century, against which Wordsworth made his famous protest, is entirely absent.  Then again, the eight-line stanza is something quite different from a mere aggregate of quatrains arranged in pairs.  The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines rhyming.  And it is singularly effective for its purpose, that of avoiding the suggestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on the descriptive action with as little interruption as might be.