Which, while I forded,

21.

good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

22.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.

Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank,

Or wild cats in a redhot iron cage –

23.

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. What kept them there, with all the plain to choose? No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,

None out of it: mad brewage set to work

Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

24.

And more than that — a furlong on

why, there!

What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,

Or brake, not wheel

that harrow fit to reel

Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,

Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

25.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood

Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

26.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

27.

And just as far as ever from the end!

Nought in the distance but the evening, nought,
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned

That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought

28.

For looking up, aware I somehow grew

'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stol'n in view. How thus they had surprised me,

solve it, you! How to get from them was no plainer case.

29.

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
you're inside the den!

As when a trap shuts

30.

Burningly it came on me all at once,

This was the place! those two hills on the right Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Fool, to be dozing at the very nonce,

After a life spent training for the sight!

31.

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart

In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

32.

Why, day

Not see? because of night perhaps?
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:

The hills like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,-

"Now stab and end the creature to the heft!

33.

Not hear? when noise was everywhere? it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,

How such an one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

34;

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides-met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set

And blew.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower cane.

RESPECTABILITY.

1.

DEAR, had the world in its caprice

Deigned to proclaim "I know you both,
Have recognized your plighted troth,

Am sponsor for you

live in peace!"

How many precious months and years

Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,

Before we found it out at last,

The world, and what it fears?

2.

How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,

Society's true ornament,

Ere we dared wander, nights like this,

Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine

And feel the Boulevart break again

To warmth and light and bliss?