Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/79

 Of illustrations and explicit schemes,

He kept in his creative charnel house

More pictures hidden of the dead and dying

Than men should see; and there were these among them,

Which he submitted once, reluctantly,

As to a loyal friend who would forgive them,

And then forget. Yet I remember now

That in the place of languid folly flown

To mourn apart, bereft of its illusions,

The desolation of its realities,

There woke amid the splendors that were lost

A frantic bacchanale of those usurpers,

Who in affronting life with evil rites

Of death, knew not themselves to be the dead—

In false authority mistaking riot

And scorn for power, and hell for paradise.