Page:Poems of Sentiment and Imagination.djvu/24

20 But Love was banished, and the monarch Self,

Had died of his own loneliness. Once more

I vowed to call Love from his exilement,

And make the city all his own again.

FOREST SPIRITS; OR, THE WOODS OF THE WEST.

ye the shades that inhabit our woods,

The spirits that dwell in their deep solitudes?

Have ye not heard them away in the shade,

And listened with awe to the sounds that they made?

And have ye not trembled with fear, when alone

Ye have heard in the forest their low solemn tone?

Have ye not heard, when the tempest was nigh,

Their voice in the wood like a mortal's wild cry?

And did ye not hear, when the storm was allayed,

Their low wailing sigh stealing out o'er the glade?

'Twas the voices of spirits—I know where they dwell,

And oft have I listened the tales that they tell.

Far away, in the forest's impervious gloom,

Where the birds never sing, and the flowers never bloom,

Where the darkness is deep as the midnight can be,

And the owl hoots all day in his horrible glee;

Where the snake and the lizard crawl over the mould,

And feast in the darkness, the damp, and the cold—

It is here that the spirits that shriek and that moan,

Retreat when the wrath of the tempest hath gone.

And the tales that they tell are of wrath and of blood;

Of the fight on the plain, and the chase on the flood;

Of the whoop, and the yell, and the death of the brave,

And of woman's wild wail o'er the warrior's grave;

O their voice is as wild as the ocean-bird's cry,

As it shrieks o'er the wave, and rings up to the sky!