One morn, disputing with my tired soul, And like a hero stiffening all my nerves, I trod a suburb shaken by the jar Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified The houses either side of that sad street, So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist, Unclean and yellow, inundated space-- A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul. Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks Should have brought alms in floods upon his head, Without the misery gleaming in his eye, Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth. He was not bent but broken: his backbone Made a so true right angle with his legs, That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave The finish to the picture, made him seem Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud He walked with troubled and uncertain gait, As though his sabots trod upon the dead, Indifferent and hostile to the world. His double followed him: tatters and stick And back and eye and beard, all were the same; Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable, These centenarian twins, these spectres odd, Trod the same pace toward some end unknown. To what fell complot was I then exposed! Humiliated by what evil chance? For as the minutes one by one went by Seven times I saw this sinister old man Repeat his image there before my eyes! Let him who smiles at my inquietude, Who never trembled at a fear like mine, Know that in their decrepitude's despite These seven old hideous monsters had the mien Of beings immortal. Then, I thought, must I, Undying, contemplate the awful eighth; Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double; Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself And his own son! In terror then I turned My back upon the infernal band, and fled To my own place, and closed my door; distraught And like a drunkard who sees all things twice, With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick, Wounded by mystery and absurdity! In vain my reason tried to cross the bar, The whirling storm but drove her back again; And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck, Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea. THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN.