At intervals the busy brook,
  Turning the mill-wheel, caught his ear;
  And through the grating of the cell
  He saw the honeysuckles peer;
  And knew’t was summer, that the sheep
  In golden pastures lay asleep;
  And felt, that, somehow, God was near. 
  In his green pulpit on the elm,
  The robin, abbot of that wood,
  Held forth by times; and Friar Jerome
  Listened, and smiled, and understood.

    While summer wrapped the blissful land,
  What joy it was to labor so,
  To see the long-tressed Angels grow
  Beneath the cunning of his hand,
  Vignette and tail-piece deftly wrought! 
  And little recked he of the poor
  That missed him at the Convent-door;
  Or, thinking of them, put the thought
  Aside.  “I feed the souls of men
  Henceforth, and not their bodies!”—­yet
  Their sharp, pinched features, now and then,
  Stole in between him and his Book,
  And filled him with a vague regret.

    Now on that region fell a blight: 
  The corn grew cankered in its sheath;
  And from the verdurous uplands rolled
  A sultry vapor fraught with death,—­
  A poisonous mist, that, like a pall,
  Hung black and stagnant over all. 
  Then came the sickness,—­the malign
  Green-spotted terror, called the Pest,
  That took the light from loving eyes,
  And made the young bride’s gentle breast
  A fatal pillow.  Ah! the woe,
  The crime, the madness that befell! 
  In one short night that vale became
  More foul than Dante’s inmost hell. 
  Men cursed their wives; and mothers left
  Their nursing babes alone to die,
  And wantoned, singing, through the streets,
  With shameless brow and frenzied eye;
  And senseless clowns, not fearing God,—­
  Such power the spotted fever had,—­
  Razed Cragwood Castle on the hill,
  Pillaged the wine-bins, and went mad. 
  And evermore that dreadful pall
  Of mist hung stagnant over all: 
  By day, a sickly light broke through
  The heated fog, on town and field;
  By night the moon, in anger, turned
  Against the earth its mottled shield.

    Then from the Convent, two and two,
  The Prior chanting at their head,
  The monks went forth to shrive the sick,
  And give the hungry grave its dead,—­
  Only Jerome, he went not forth,
  But hiding in his dusty nook,
  “Let come what will, I must illume
  The last ten pages of my Book!”
  He drew his stool before the desk,
  And sat him down, distraught and wan,
  To paint his darling masterpiece,
  The stately figure of Saint John. 
  He sketched the head with pious care,
  Laid in the tint, when, powers of Grace! 
  He found a grinning Death’s-head there,
  And not the grand Apostle’s face!