See I not, there, a white shimmer?--
Something with pale silken shine?
No; it is the column's glimmer,
'Gainst the gloomy hedge of pine.
O longing heart! no more thyself delight
With shadow-forms--a sweet deceiving pleasure;
Filling thy arms but as the vault of night
Infoldeth darkness without hope or measure.
O lead the living beauty to my sight,
That living love her loveliness may treasure!
Let but her shadow fall across my eyes,
And straight my dreams exulting truths will rise!
And soft as, when, purple and golden,
The clouds of the evening descend,
So had she drawn nigh unbeholden,
And wakened with kisses her friend."
Never had song a stranger accompaniment than this song; for the air was
full of fierce noises near and afar. Again the colonel went to the
window. When he drew back the curtains, at Adela's request, and pulled
up the blind, you might have fancied the dark wind full of snowy
Banshees, fleeting and flickering by, and uttering strange ghostly cries
of warning. The friends crowded into the bay-window, and stared out into
the night with a kind of happy awe. They pressed their brows against the
panes, in the vain hope of seeing where there was no light. Every now
and then the wind would rush up against the window in fierce attack, as
if the creatures that rode by upon the blast had seen the row of white
faces, and it angered them to be thus stared at, and they rode their
airy steeds full tilt against the thin rampart of glass that protected
the human weaklings from becoming the spoil of their terrors.
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