Page:The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, Volume 8, 1922.djvu/586

NEW POEMS And ever baffled, ever shut from passage:—

Then when the house shook and a horde of noises

Came out and clattered over me all night,—

Then, would my heart stand still,

My hair creep fearfully upon my head

And, with my tear-wet face

Buried among the bed-clothes,

Long and bitterly would I pray and wrestle

Till gentle sleep

Threw her great mantle over me,

And my hard breathing gradually ceased.

I was then the Indian,

Well and happy and full of glee and pleasure,

Both hands full of life.

And not without divine impulses

Shot into me by the untried non-ego;

But, like the Indian, too,

Not yet exempt from feverish questionings

And on my bed of leaves,

Writhing terribly in grasp of terror,

As when the still stars and the great white moon

Watch me athwart black foliage,

Trembling before the interminable vista,

The widening wells of space

In which my thought flags like a wearied bird

In the mid ocean of his autumn flight—

Prostrate before the indefinite great spirit

That the external warder

Plunged like a dagger

Into my bosom. 572