Poems. Howells William Dean

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      Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him

      Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope for stopping. Then, turning,–

      “This is the place where it happened,” brokenly whispered the pilot.

      “Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time.”

      Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight,

      Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines,

      And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.

      Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward

      Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.

      All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows

      Smote with a mystical sense of infinite sorrow upon us.

      Red roses, in the slender vases burning,

      Breathed all upon the air,–

      The passion and the tenderness and yearning,

      The waiting and the doubting and despair.

      Still with the music of her voice was haunted,

      Through all its charméd rhymes,

      The open book of such a one as chanted

      The things he dreamed in old, old summer-times.

      The silvern chords of the piano trembled

      Still with the music wrung

      From them; the silence of the room dissembled

      The closes of the songs that she had sung.

      The languor of the crimson shawl’s abasement,–

      Lying without a stir

      Upon the floor,–the absence at the casement,

      The solitude and hush were full of her.

      Without, and going from the room, and never

      Departing, did depart

      Her steps; and one that came too late forever

      Felt them go heavy o’er his broken heart.

      And, sitting in the house’s desolation,

      He could not bear the gloom,

      The vanishing encounter and evasion

      Of things that were and were not in the room.

      Through midnight streets he followed fleeting visions

      Of faces and of forms;

      He heard old tendernesses and derisions

      Amid the sobs and cries of midnight storms.

      By midnight lamps, and from the darkness under

      That lamps made at their feet,

      He saw sweet eyes peer out in innocent wonder,

      And sadly follow after him down the street.

      The noonday crowds their restlessness obtruded

      Between him and his quest;

      At unseen corners jostled and eluded,

      Against his hand her silken robes were pressed.

      Doors closed upon her; out of garret casements

      He knew she looked at him;

      In splendid mansions and in squalid basements,

      Upon the walls he saw her shadow swim.

      From rapid carriages she gleamed upon him,

      Whirling away from sight;

      From all the hopelessness of search she won him

      Back to the dull and lonesome house at night.

      Full early into dark the twilights saddened

      Within its closéd doors;

      The echoes, with the clock’s monotony maddened,

      Leaped loud in welcome from the hollow floors;

      But gusts that blew all day with solemn laughter

      From wide-mouthed chimney-places,

      And the strange noises between roof and rafter,

      The wainscot clamor, and the scampering races

      Of mice that chased each other through the chambers,

      And up and down the stair,

      And rioted among the ashen embers,

      And left their frolic footprints everywhere,–

      Were hushed to hear his heavy tread ascending

      The broad steps, one by one,

      And toward the solitary chamber tending,

      Where the dim phantom of his hope alone

      Rose up to meet him, with his growing nearer,

      Eager for his embrace,

      And moved, and melted into the white mirror,

      And stared at him with his own haggard face.

      But, turning, he was ’ware her looks beheld him

      Out of the mirror white;

      And at the window yearning arms she held him,

      Out of the vague and sombre fold of night.

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