| |
| HAUNTED by unknown feet— | |
| Ways of the midnight hour! | |
| Strangely you murmur below me, | |
| Strange is your half-silent power. | |
| Places of life and of death, | 5 |
| Numbered and named as streets, | |
| What, through your channels of stone, | |
| Is the tide that unweariedly beats? | |
| A whisper, a sigh-laden breath, | |
| Is all that I hear of its flowing, | 10 |
| Footsteps of stranger and foe— | |
| Footsteps of friends, could we meet them- | |
| Alike to me in my sorrow; | |
| Alike to a life left alone. | |
| Yet swift as my heart they throb, | 15 |
| They fall thick as tears on the stone: | |
| My spirit perchance may borrow | |
| New strength from their eager tone. | |
| |
| Still ever that slip and slide | |
| Of the feet that shuffle or glide, | 20 |
| And linger or haste through the populous waste | |
| Of the shadowy, dim-lit square! | |
| And I know not, from the sound, | |
| As I sit and ponder within, | |
| The goal to which those steps are bound,— | 25 |
| On hest of mercy, or hest of sin, | |
| Or joy’s short-measured round; | |
| Yet a meaning deeper they bear | |
| In their vaguely muffled din. | |
| |
| Roar of the multitude, | 30 |
| Chafe of the million-crowd, | |
| To this you are all subdued | |
| In the murmurous, sad night-air! | |
| Yet whether you thunder aloud, | |
| Or hush your tone to a prayer, | 35 |
| You chant amain through the modern maze | |
| The only epic of our days. | |
| |
| Still as death are the places of life; | |
| The city seems crumbled and gone, | |
| Sunk ’mid invisible deeps— | 40 |
| The city so lately rife | |
| With the stir of brain and brawn. | |
| Haply it only sleeps; | |
| But what if indeed it were dead, | |
| And another earth should arise | 45 |
| To greet the grey of the dawn? | |
| Faint then our epic would wail | |
| To those who should come in our stead. | |
| But what if the earth were ours? | |
| What if, with holier eyes, | 50 |
| We should meet the new hope, and not fail? | |
| |
| Weary the night grows pale: | |
| With a blush as of opening flowers | |
| Dimly the East shines red. | |
| Can it be that the morn shall fulfil | 55 |
| My dream, and refashion our clay | |
| As the poet may fashion his rhyme? | |
| Hark to that mingled scream | |
| Rising from workshop and mill— | |
| Hailing some marvellous sight; | 60 |
| Mighty breath of the hours, | |
| Poured through the trumpets of steam; | |
| Awful tornado of time, | |
| Blowing us whither it will! | |
| |
| God has breathed in the nostrils of night, | 65 |
| And behold, it is day! | |
| |
