'A Little Low Dry Garret'
The door stands locked, the room is still,
On cornice, ledge, and window-sill,
So deep, so smooth the dust appears,
You well may guess what train of years
Has crawled since last the grinding key
Disturbed this room's serenity.
With none to stir its even pall
The dust has gathered over all.
Still on his age-old labour bent
The crafty spider spreads his tent;
And peering from its shelter dim
The dusty levels seem to him
As drear a waste on balk and beam
As any desert man may dream
Beyond dead mountains in Cathay—
Vast and encumbered with decay.
Yet vaster still the floor expands,
A continent of lonely lands.
His bright fierce eyes can scarce espy
Its limits, as he sits on high
For ever twisting silken gins,
And idly musing while he spins:
'What spider of sagacious strain,
Wary or politic in brain,
Would, climbing down the pathless steeps,
Descend to those unhallowed deeps?
Better to dwell in safety still
On this ancestral window-sill,
To leave foolhardy quests unsought,
And spin the web our fathers taught.'
Yet sometimes does a traveller glide
Along those cliffs—the wainscot side—
That stretch through light from gloom to gloom—
The furthest corners of the room—
When, wandering the barren flat
On unknown quests, the knightly rat
Forth from his corner dares to stir,
A lone and hardy voyager.
The desert that all pathway lacks
Is furrowed by his toiling tracks.
And when the venturous quest is won,
The homeward journey safely done,
Once more deserted lies the plain,
And dusty quiet broods again.
But when the moon, serene and high,
Sails out upon the empty sky,
And her white radiance far and wide
Spills on the sleeping country-side,
Then this dark garden, waste before—
This desolate ungarnished floor—
Shines limned and blazoned like a shield
New-fallen on a stricken field;
Whereon her light, through bar and pane,
Shadows dark lines of sable stain—
Pile, bend or chevron, sharply writ;
While all the rafters over it
Glow in the lustre of the moon,
Ebony-edged and silver-strewn.
Oh, royal state and splendour must—
So wise men tell us—fall to dust.
But few the sages who have known
The fairy grace of dust unblown,
That moonlight fires for none to see—
Diamond, silver, ivory.
Page(s) 22-23
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