Page:The city of dreadful night - and other poems (IA cityofdreadfulni00thomrich).pdf/20

 Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping, Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Yet as in some necropolis you find Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind Like tragic masks of stone.With weary tread, Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, Or sit foredone and desolately ponder Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth, A woman rarely, now and then a child: A child!If here the heart turns sick with ruth To see a little one from birth defiled, Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to themselves, they speak To one another seldom, for their woe Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour, Unless there waits some victim of like glamour, To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.