Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/107

Came drifting images, follies, grotesques,
Hallucinations; them he could not match
With truth more ancient than the heavens and earth,
The truth of reason; as from dreams he woke
To see, drawn nigh, the glimmering water lift
Horizons vague, arms of an inland sea
By brimming marshes; and a cypress grove,
Along the hither edge of that full flood,
Cast on it glooms indissolubly deep.
"Here might some dragon deity have dwelt,
And woe inhabited the wood," he mused.
Hard underfoot the bare and blanching soil
Grew skeletonized with ribbed and naked rock.
Black in the sun, the creeping shadow fell
Upon him, entering the sepulchral grove;
Its huge, columnar stems, flame-like, rose up,
Lifting a pointed gloom in burning skies,
And buried him amid an antique wood
Of mossy trunks and massive growth; above,
Heaven's broken spaces glimpsed; below, 't was night,
And in the heart thereof vast avenues
Opened their hoar, impenetrable ways;
Whereat he paused and pondered. The thick air
Seemed thronged with unseen beings; obscure shapes

Pressed on him in the dusk, unearthly things,