Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/107

Rh Came drifting images, follies, grotesques,

Hallucinations; them he could not match

With truth more ancient than the heavens and earth,

The truth of reason; as from dreams he woke

To see, drawn nigh, the glimmering water lift

Horizons vague, arms of an inland sea

By brimming marshes; and a cypress grove,

Along the hither edge of that full flood,

Cast on it glooms indissolubly deep.

"Here might some dragon deity have dwelt,

And woe inhabited the wood," he mused.

Hard underfoot the bare and blanching soil

Grew skeletonized with ribbed and naked rock.

Black in the sun, the creeping shadow fell

Upon him, entering the sepulchral grove;

Its huge, columnar stems, flame-like, rose up,

Lifting a pointed gloom in burning skies,

And buried him amid an antique wood

Of mossy trunks and massive growth; above,

Heaven's broken spaces glimpsed; below, 't was night,

And in the heart thereof vast avenues

Opened their hoar, impenetrable ways;

Whereat he paused and pondered. The thick air

Seemed thronged with unseen beings; obscure shapes

Pressed on him in the dusk, unearthly things,