So pass the days, so fall the nights; A banquet of renewed delights; The old horizons lift and pass In magic changes like a dream, And in the heavens’ azure glass Tomorrow’s jasper arches gleam— With many a vale and mountain mass, And many a singing, shining stream. The post is dead and daisied now— In shadow fades from heart and brow— The air is incense, and the breeze Is sweet with siren melodies, And all the castled hills before In blooming vistas sweep and soar Like silver lace, the clouds are strewn Along the distant, dreamy zone; It is a happy, happy time, As wayward as a poet’s rhyme, And ever as the sun goes down The west is shut with rosy bars, And Night puts on her golden crown And fills the vases of the stars. · · · · · A hundred nights, a hundred days, Nor folded cloud nor silken haze Mellow the sun’s midsummer blaze. Along a brown and barren plain In silence drags the wasted train; The dust starts up beneath your tread, Like angry ashes of the dead, To blind you with a choking cloud And wrap you in a yellow shroud. There are no birds to sing your joy, You have no joy for birds to sing,— A hundred fangs your hearts destroy— A thousand troubles fret and sting. The desert mocks you all the while With that dry shimmer of a smile That dazzles on a bleaching skull,— The bloom is withered on your cheek You slowly move and lowly speak, And every eye is dim and dull. Alas, it is a lonesome land Of bitter sage and barren sand Under a bitter, barren sky That never heard the robin sing, Nor kissed the larks’s exultant wing, Nor breathed a rose’s fragrant sigh! A weary land—alas! alas! The shadows of the vultures pass— A spectral sign across your path; The gaunt, gray wolf, with head askance Throws back at you a scowlling glance Of cringing hate and coward wrath. And like a wraith accursed and banned Fades out before your lifted hand; A dim, sad land, forgot, forsworn By all bright life that may not mourn— Acrazed with glist’ning ghosts of seas In broideries of flower and trees, And rivers, blue and cool, that seem To ripple as in fevered dream— Only to taunt the thirst, and fly From withered lips and lurid eye.