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The tempest with its spoils had drifted in,
Till each unwholesome stone was darkly spotted,
As thickly as the leopard's dappled skin,
With leaves that rankly rotted.

The air was thick-and in the upper gloom

The bat or something in its shape-was winging;

And on the wall, as chilly as a tomb,

The Death's-head moth was clinging.

That mystic moth, which, with a sense profound
Of all unholy presence, augurs truly;

And with a grim significance flits round
The taper burning bluely.

Such omens in the place there seemed to be,
At every crooked turn, or on the landing,
The straining eyeball was prepared to see
Some apparition standing.

For over all there hung a cloud of fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

Yet no portentous shape the sight amazed;
Each object plain, and tangible, and valid;

But from their tarnished frames dark figures gazed,
And faces spectre-pallid.

Not merely with the mimic life that lies

Within the compass of Art's simulation:

Their souls were looking through their painted eyes
With awful speculation.

On every lip a speechless horror dwelt;
On every brow the burthen of affliction;
The old ancestral spirits knew and felt
The house's malediction.

Such earnest wo their features overcast,

They might have stirred, or sighed, or wept, or spoken; But, save the hollow moaning of the blast,

The stillness was unbroken.

No other sound or stir of life was there,
Except my steps in solitary clamber,

From flight to flight, from humid stair to stair,
From chamber into chamber.

Deserted rooms of luxury and state,
That old magnificence had richly furnished
With pictures, cabinets of ancient date,
And carvings gilt and burnished.

Rich hangings, storied by the needle's art,
With scripture history, or classic fable;
But all had faded, save one ragged part,
Where Cain was slaying Abel.

The silent waste of mildew and the moth
Had marred the tissue with a partial ravage;
But undecaying frowned upon the cloth
Each feature stern and savage.

The sky was pale; the cloud a thing of doubt;
Some hues were fresh, and some decayed and duller;

But still the BLOODY HAND shone strangely out

With vehemence of color!

The BLOODY HAND that with a lurid stain
Shone on the dusty floor, a dismal token,
Projected from the casement's painted pane,
Where all beside was broken.

The BLOODY HAND significant of crime,
That glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its crimson unimpaired by time,
In such a wondrous manner!

O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

The death-watch ticked behind the panneled oak,
Inexplicable tremors shook the arras,

And echoes strange and mystical awoke,

The fancy to embarrass.

Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,

But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly, The while some secret inspiration said,

That chamber is the ghostly!

Across the door no gossamer festoon

Swung pendulous-no web-no dusty fringes,

No silky chrysalis or white cocoon,

About its nooks and hinges.

The spider shunned the interdicted room,

The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished, And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom The very midge had vanished.

One lonely ray that glanced upon a Bed,
As if with awful aim direct and certain,
To show the BLOODY HAND in burning red
Embroidered on the curtain.

And yet no gory stain was on the quilt-
The pillow in its place had slowly rotted:
The floor alone retained the trace of guilt,
Those boards obscurely spotted.

Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence
With mazy doubles to the grated casement-
Oh what a tale they told of fear intense,
Of horror and amazement!

What human creature in the dead of night

Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance? Had sought the door, the window in his flight, Striving for dear existence ?

What shrieking spirit in that bloody room
Its mortal frame had violently quitted?-
Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly shadow flitted.

Across the sunbeam, and along the wall,
But painted on the air so very dimly,
It hardly veiled the tapestry at all,
Or portrait frowning grimly.

O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

LIFE IN THE SICK ROOM.*

Of all the know-nothing persons in this world, commend us to the man who has "never known a day's illness." He is a moral dunce; one who has lost the greatest lesson in life; who has skipped the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, the Sick Chamber. Let him be versed in mathematics, profound in metaphysics, a ripe scholar in the classics, a bachelor of arts, or even a doctor in divinity, yet is he as one of those gentlemen whose education has been neglected. For all his college acquirements, how inferior is he in wholesome knowledge to the mortal who has had but a quarter's gout, or a half-year of ague -how infinitely below the fellow-creature who has been soundly taught his tic-douloureux, thoroughly grounded in the rheumatics, and deeply red in the scarlet fever! And yet, what is more common than to hear a great hulking, florid fellow, bragging of an ignorance, a brutal ignorance, that he shares in common with the pig and the bullock, the generality of which die, probably, without ever having experienced a day's indisposition?

To such a monster of health the volume before us will be a sealed book; for how can he appreciate its allusions to physical suffering, whose bodily annoyance has never reached beyond a slight tickling of the epidermis, or the tingling of a foot gone to sleep? How should he, who has sailed through life with a clean bill of health, be able to sympathize with the feelings, or the quiet sayings and doings, of an invalid condemned to a lifelong quarantine in his chamber? What should he know of Life in the Sick Room? As little as our poor paralytic grandmother knows of Life in London.

* Life in the Sick Room. By an Invalid. Moxon.

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