C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Psychaura

THE WIND of an autumn midnight

Is moaning around my door—

The curtains wave at the window,

The carpet lifts on the floor.

There are sounds like startled footfalls

In the distant chambers now,

And the touching of airy fingers

Is busy on hand and brow.

’Tis thus, in the Soul’s dark dwelling—

By the moody host unsought—

Through the chambers of memory wander

The invisible airs of thought.

For it bloweth where it listeth,

With a murmur loud or low;

Whence it cometh—whither it goeth—

None tell us, and none may know.

Now wearying round the portals

Of the vacant, desolate mind—

As the doors of a ruined mansion,

That creak in the cold night wind.

And anon an awful memory

Sweeps over it fierce and high—

Like the roar of a mountain forest

When the midnight gale goes by.

Then its voice subsides in wailing,

And, ere the dawning of day,

Murmuring fainter and fainter,

In the distance dies away.