DEEP in the forest glade I laid me down
And slept; then did this vision come upon me
Sublimely terrible! Methought I saw
The earth a prey to devastating plague,
And all her children writhing on her breast
I' the death throes. And I saw a lovely girl,
Beautiful as the dying glance of day,
Kneel by her lover--one whose warrior heart
Had never stoop'd to love but one; and now
Disease had wound him in her scaly folds,
And breathed her poisonous breathings into his.
But late to gentle Rosalind he sued
For bliss, which woman's love alone can give;
And now, fierce o'er his heart had come the flame
Of wild delirium; and he rav'd, and strove
To tear the dry white flesh off his bones,
Grinning with clenched teeth, and cursing life,
And her who had been more than life to him--
That patient one, who kissed away the drops
Of anguish from his burning forehead. She
I saw, ere long, like to a propless vine,
Droop in the arms of Death, whose touch was here
But merciful. The man lived yet awhile,
And, stagg'ring to his feet, upreared to heaven
His fiendish eyes and loathsome countenance,
All leopard-like bespotted with the plague,
Fiercely blaspheming, till his swollen tongue
Burst, and he sank in speechlessness to die.
And now I saw a tyrant one, who made
Man's life a plaything, and I knew him not
So much by his apparel, bright with gold
And purple, like the heart's blood he had shed,
As by the look of horrible despair
That drew his lips apart, and fill'd his soul
With the intensity of hell. He lay
Upon the threshold of his palace gate,
Whither, with falt'ring footsteps, he had crept
(E'en like an ailing cur) to seek for those
Who erst had pandered to his appetites,
However base, with ready slavery;
They had deserted him in search of gold--
The yellow dross--to purchase which, their king
Had paid the price of peace. Blind fools! they
clutch'd
The sparkling metal, merry with the thought
Of all the joys which they should taste ere long;
They clutch'd, and died. Death was their only heir;
And he, a monarch, lay, like Lazarus,
One living sore; and he was trampled down
Beneath the feet of thousands that afar
Rush'd onward, vainly seeking an egress
From a doom'd world, by any other path
Than that of dissolution. Hark! that howl,
Echoing abroad throughout the spacious earth,
Like the voiced misery of ten thousand years.
And lo! a shadowy form comes floating on,
Borne in a moving car of lurid flame,
That sweeps the globe's whole surface far and wide
Of every living, every growing thing.
Leaving them heaped in ashes. From the heaven
That giant figure gazed full fixedly
Awhile, and then, with one heartburst of woe,
That shattered into gaping ruins earth,
The phantom spake--'Time, all thy offspring dead,
Thou, too, must die!' Then, from his burning
throne,
Hurling himself, he seized, with monstrous grasp,
The motionless remains of what was earth,
And vanished.