THROUGH the long hall the shuttered windows shed
A dubious light on every up-turned head,—
On locks like those of Absalom the fair,
On the bald apex ringed with scanty hair,
On blank indifference and on curious stare;
On the pale Showman reading from his stage
The hieroglyphics of that facial page;
Half sad, half scornful, listening to the bruit
Of restless cane-tap and impatient foot,
And the shrill call, across the general din,
"Roll up your curtain! Let the show begin!"
At length a murmur like the winds that break
Into green waves the prairie's grassy lake,
Deepened and swelled to music clear and loud,
And, as the west wind lifts a summer cloud,
The curtain rose, disclosing wide and far
A green land stretching to the evening star,
Fair rivers, skirted by primeval trees
And flowers hummed over by the desert bees, Marked by tall bluffs whose slopes of greenness show
Fantastic outcrops of the rock below,——
The slow result of patient Nature's pains,
And plastic fingering of her sun and rains,-
Arch, tower, and gate, grotesquely-windowed hall,
And long escarpment of half-crumbled wall,
Huger than those which, from steep hills of vine,
Stare through their loop-holes on the travelled
Rhine;