Page:The Soul of a Century.djvu/129



A white glow of light you poured into my soul’s lamp ’Til in an agony of red it bled into the dark. I walked in thought, beneath the day’s ceiling cold and damp As in the dreaded melancholies of a darkened park,

Where on the frescoed walls, the twilight’s billows fall And long forgotten legends gaze through the darkened frames Like windows that open onto the centuries’ mystic hall And gaze on the darkened horizon of Mysteries without names

Yon in the smoking distance, where roll the fogs of grey Above the rooftops of palaces and over the boulevards’ flight, Victorious life tosses and bubbles o’er with a maddening play In the bizzare foams of Passions and longing and might

As women’s fiery looks rain with sparks into the bodily desires The burned out strengths of nerves beneath the skull decay, And the joys and fears and sorrows in countless illusory fires, Upon the taut stretched strings of The Secret, quiver away.