'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams, I will hold my light above them and seek their faces, I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins. . . . ' The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness, Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest, Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains. We hear him and take him among us like a wind of music, Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard; We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight, We pour in a sinister mass, we ascend a stair, With laughter and cry, with word upon murmured word, We flow, we descend, we turn. . . . and the eternal dreamer Moves on among us like light, like evening air . . . Good night! good night! good night! we go our ways, The rain runs over the pavement before our feet, The cold rain falls, the rain sings. We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces To what the eternal evening brings. Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky. We have built a city of towers. Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness. Our souls are light. They have shaken a burden of hours. . . . What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again. 1916-1917 End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The House of Dust, by Conrad Aiken