I know not, in his solitary pains, Whether he seemed to feel as in his veins The moral mischief circulating still, Racked with the torture of the double will; And like some frontier-land where armies wage The mighty wars, engage and yet engage All through the summer in the fierce campaign; March, counter-march, gain, lose, and yet regain; With battle reeks the desolated plain; So felt his nature yielded to the strife Of the contending good and ill of life. But a whole year this penance he endured, Nor even then would think that he was cured. Once in a quarter, in the country lane, He met his wife and paid his quarter’s gain; To bring the children she besought in vain. He has a life small happiness that gives, Who friendless in a London lodging lives, Dines in a dingy chop-house, and returns To a lone room while all within him yearns For sympathy, and his whole nature burns With a fierce thirst for some one,—is there none?— To expend his human tenderness upon. So blank, and hard, and stony is the way To walk, I wonder not men go astray. Edward, whom still a sense that never slept On the strict path undeviating kept, One winter-evening found himself pursued Amidst the dusky thronging multitude. Quickly he walked, but strangely swift was she, And pertinacious, and would make him see. He saw at last, and recognising slow, Discovered in this hapless thing of woe The occasion of his shame twelve wretched months ago. She gaily laughed, she cried, and sought his hand, And spoke sweet phrases of her native land; Exiled, she said, her lovely home had left, Not to forsake a friend of all but her bereft; Exiled, she cried, for liberty, for love, She was; still limpid eyes she turned above. So beauteous once, and now such misery in, Pity had all but softened him to sin; But while she talked, and wildly laughed, and cried, And plucked the hand which sadly he denied, A stranger came and swept her from his side. He watched them in the gas-lit darkness go, And a voice said within him, Even so, So midst the gloomy mansions where they dwell The lost souls walk the flaming streets of hell! The lamps appeared to fling a baleful glare, A brazen heat was heavy in the air; And it was hell, and he some unblest wanderer there. For a long hour he stayed the streets to roam, Late gathering sense, he gained his garret home; There found a telegraph that bade him come Straight to the country, where his daughter, still His darling child, lay dangerously ill. The doctor would he bring? Away he went And found the doctor; to the office sent A letter, asking leave, and went again, And with a wild confusion in his brain, Joining the doctor caught the latest train. The train swift whirled them from the city light Into the shadows of the natural night. ’Twas silent starry midnight on the down,