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THE 
 CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT 
 
 JAMES THOMSON 
 
Mr. Thomas B. Mosher having acquired from us 
 as proprietors of the copyright of the late James 
 Thomson the American right for issuing a limited 
 edition of The City of Dreadful Night, it is our 
 wish that with him alone the reprinting of the poem 
 should remain. 
 
 Bertram Dobell. 
 William D. Reeves. 
 London, July 25th, 1892. 
 
Chrly Four Hundred copies of this Small Paper Edition 
 (PostSvo.) fiave been printed. Each copy numbered, 
 and the type distributed. 
 No J ^9 
 
 7 
 
Past is the fear of future Doubt, 
 The Sun is from the Dial gone, 
 
 The Sands are sunk, the Glass is out, 
 The Folly of the Farce is done." 
 
 I 
 
THE CITY OF DREADFUL 
 NIGHT BY JAMES THOM- 
 SON WITH INTRODUCTION 
 BY E. CAVAZZA 
 
 PRINTED FOR THOMAS E. MOSHER AND 
 PUBLISHED BY HIM AT 37 EXCHANGE 
 STREET PORTLAND MAINE MDCCCXCII 
 
I 
 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 Paob 
 
 Introduction, xi 
 
 The City of Dreadfui. Night. ... r 
 Appendix : 
 
 To OUR Ladies of Death 77 
 
 Insomnia 87 
 
 Bibliography, • • , 99 
 
 513416 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT 
 is a poem of pessimism, which, 
 neither widely read nor popular, has, how- 
 ever, a twofold value as a document of hu- 
 manity and as an extraordinarily thorough 
 and vivid representation of a sole, overmas- 
 tering mood undesirable but undeniable. 
 Pessimism — whether it casts an occasional 
 passing shadow upon the mind, as happens 
 to most persons ; or whether, as in rarer 
 cases, it hangs a persistent gloomy fog be- 
 tween a soul and the sunlight — always 
 belongs to the pathology of spirit and flesh 
 interwoven. It is too often a malady, subtle 
 and terrible, a rational madness, a paraly- 
 sis of the soul, a nyctalopic sight which sees 
 objects clearly defined, black upon black, 
 in a lightless atmosphere. Such a death 
 in life we are bound to pity. We ought to 
 try to comprehend, while we marvel at the 
 spirit that continually makes the great re- 
 fusal of the abundant delights of the mo- 
 ment and of the instincts and analogies 
 which, assuring of a future good, speak in 
 
XIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 a manner unanswerable by the dialectics of 
 materialism. 
 
 In order to understand the utterances of 
 a sincere pessimist we must seek for a 
 cause more remote and intricate than the 
 disillusions or the misfortunes which the 
 sufferer himself is apt to blame for his mis- 
 ery. For it is not those most sharply or 
 heavily afflicted who fall into chronic mel- 
 ancholy. It is not a past cataclysm, but 
 instead a natural poverty of soil which re- 
 sults in rank weeds only and cruel thorns. 
 Upon the slopes of Etna, many times ru- 
 ined by fiery streams — the lava, after a 
 while that it lies under the sun, breaks into 
 mellow earth, plenteous of olives, vines and 
 corn. 
 
 The incurable physical sufferings of 
 Leopardi and of Heine readily and suffi- 
 ciently account for their pessimism ex- 
 pressed in poetry; the one was like a 
 divine, sad nightingale, singing amid a 
 moonless grove, the other had in his sophis- 
 ticated song the mocking-bird's cries and 
 laughter, broken and feverishly alternated. 
 
 We shall hardly be able to read justly 
 The City of Dreadful Night, the unique 
 and startling embodiment of the convic- 
 tions of James Thomson, without some 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 rapid inquiry into the causes of the preva- 
 lent attitude of his mind. His was a sen- 
 sitive, high-strung temperament in prey to 
 one relentless mood, which for many years 
 visited him with increasing frequency and 
 power, until it obtained over him complete 
 mastery. The tragic obsession was not, 
 indeed, without moments of truce ; but 
 these appear excited and insecure — like 
 the respite given to the victim of a tiger's 
 play. 
 
 Of a malady, searching and gradual as 
 this which invaded the spirit of James 
 Thomson, it is not possible to make a di- 
 agnosis other than generalized and tenta- 
 tive ; for we must be aware that factors 
 may have existed which could throw out 
 the whole calculation. His inheritance 
 from a mother of sad temperament and 
 austere creed, and from a father more or 
 less dipsomanig,c, would appear to give 
 reason enough for his hypochrondria and 
 melancholy. The Scottish quality of his 
 intellect, persistent and argumentative, and 
 of his wild and haunted fantasy, rendered 
 him ready to accept the report of the 
 nerves which, themselves unstrung, found 
 in the universe only a clash and jangle of 
 false notes, a confusion of chords without 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 key or resolution. Such a nature as Thom- 
 son's might easily fall, by its own gravita- 
 tion, into despairing pessimism. His rea- 
 r son admitted nothing beyond the limits of 
 its own research ; his imagination, strong 
 enough to supply his theories with start- 
 lingly concrete illustrations, did not avail 
 to initiate for him any comforts or hopes. 
 By some curious, clear glimpse of criticism 
 he has defined the state of his spirit with 
 almost scientific precision, in course of the 
 poem which w£ are about to read : 
 
 What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms ? 
 
 They have much wisdom, yet they are not wise, 
 
 They have much goodness, yet they do not well . . 
 
 They are most rational and yet insane ; 
 
 An outward madness not to be controlled ; 
 
 A perfect reason in the central brain, 
 
 Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold, 
 
 And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly 
 
 The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly 
 
 To cheat itself, refusing to behold. 
 
 In this piteous vivisection it may not be 
 overfanciful to recognize the peculiar sec- 
 ond-sight of the poet's self, his double met 
 face to face. This vivid division of per- 
 sonality — said to be a symptom of un- 
 soundness of brain — appears in other ex- 
 amples, still more marked, in the imagery 
 of The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
INTRODUCTION. XVII 
 
 Thomson himself believed that the one 
 cause of his long and ever-deepening mis- 
 ery was the death of his betrothed, Matilda 
 Weller, a beautiful girl hardly beyond child- 
 hood. A similar experience befell Novalis, 
 as is known ; and in honor of this corre- 
 spondence in grief, Thomson assumed as 
 part of his pseudonym the anagram Vano- 
 lis. Bysshe Vanolis was the name which 
 he chose for himself, and he desired that 
 his publications should be signed merely 
 with the initials B. V. 
 
 In regard to the effect of the early sor- 
 row upon Thomson's view of life, Carlyle's 
 criticism upon the case of Novalis need 
 not be cited here ; but preferably that of 
 an essayist who wrote directly concerning 
 Thomson : — 
 
 I do not agree ... as r^arding this l^ereave- 
 ment as the cause of his lifelong misery. .She was, 
 I hold, merely the peg on which he hung his rai- 
 ment of sorrow; without her, another object might 
 have served the same purpose. He carried with 
 him his proper curse, constitutional melancholia. 
 
 At the same time must be admitted the 
 judicious observation of Thomson's biog- 
 rapher, Mr. H. S. Salt, who believes that 
 the death of the young girl, more than any 
 other single circumstance, " fostered and 
 
XVIII INTRODUCTION. 
 
 developed the malady to which Thomson 
 was perhaps predisposed." 
 
 Another memorialist, Mr. Bertram Do- 
 bell, suggests that Thomson had " much in 
 him, in fact, of the self-torturing spirit 
 which afflicted Rousseau, and which drove 
 Cowper into insanity." 
 
 For consciousness turned in against it- 
 self there is no defence; this intimate war- 
 fare means total defeat ; and the longer 
 the resistance the slower the torment and 
 the devastation. 
 
 Were these few pages the preface to a 
 volume which should represent the various 
 themes and moods expressed by the entire 
 range of Thomson's writings, it would be 
 opportune to do more than merely hint at 
 the sensitive capacity for enjoyment, the 
 affectionate and companionable traits of 
 the man, the loyal friendships which he 
 inspired, and the energetic — yet half-heart- 
 ed and intermittent — efforts made by him 
 against the forces of outward conditions, 
 inward discouragements, and the unfortu- 
 nate habit inherited from his father, which 
 from time to time overtaking him, became 
 at last the means of a slow, not unwilling, 
 suicide. 
 
 But it is a single poem. The City of 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIX 
 
 Dreadful Night (with, as illustration, To 
 our Ladies of Death and Insomnia, the lat- 
 ter commenting upon it in its own to- 
 nality) that I am invited to present to 
 American readers. This, then, is the time 
 and place for appreciation of the unique 
 and sinister beauty of a work that has 
 called forth the praise of such artists as 
 Swinburne, Rossetti, Philip Bourke Mars- 
 ton, while on this side of the Atlantic, 
 Longfellow and Emerson expressed their 
 interest in its fame. Under the darkness']* 
 of deep waters, within the shell of pessi-/ 
 mism, grew this rare product of disease] 
 the black pearl of poetry that is namedl 
 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 Although this poem is justly to be con- 
 sidered as the definitive word of James 
 Thomson's criticism Qf life, as well as the 
 crowning example of his literary art, it 
 would be unfair to ignore the testimony 
 contained in a note addressed by him to 
 George Eliot, in sending to her a copy of 
 the book : -^ 
 
 The poem in question (he wrote to her) was the 
 result of sleepless hypochondria. I am aware that 
 the truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of 
 noonday, though one's nature may lead him to 
 dwell in the former rather than the latter. 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 But in the time that he was writing the 
 poem, for him the noonday was as' though 
 it never had been. The work has the tre- 
 mendous vividness of utter possession by 
 one fixed idea. The powers of darkness 
 have created, saying, Let there not be 
 light. 
 
 The City of Dreadful Nighf was imag- 
 ined during a sojourn in London, where 
 the environment and the climate added to 
 the depression of Thomson's spirits. In 
 order to find some relief from the conscious 
 nightmare of insomnia he was 
 
 Constrained to move through the unmoving hours, 
 Accursed from rest because the hours stood still. 
 
 He walked the streets of London, silent 
 and lonely in the darkness of midnight, or 
 stood upon the bridge looking down into 
 the black, sullen waters, until the dawn 
 sent him shivering to his house. These 
 are the scenes which reappear in the City 
 of Night and its River of the Suicides. 
 The dismal town is, indeed, a fata morgana 
 of London projected upon a cloud. Its 
 architecture is the frozen music of a dead 
 march heard in the insomnia that has the 
 illusions without the repose of dreams. 
 
 This city was not built in a day ; its con- 
 
INTRODUCTION. XXI 
 
 structor had served a long apprenticeship 
 before he reared the image of the goddess 
 Melencholia upon the pedestal. For James 
 Thomson all roads led to this Rome, the 
 capital of the empire of the Inane. He had 
 written, at the age of twentj'-three, " The 
 Doom of a City," an allegory (as Mr. Salt 
 defines it) of^the-^ony insensibility of the 
 human heart when numbed by destiny and 
 despair. The motive was taken from the 
 petrified city of one of the Arabian Nights' 
 tales. In The Festival of Life, interrupted 
 by two masks of Death kindly or cruel ; in 
 the wild utterances of the Mater Tenebra- 
 rum, the composed solemnity of Our Ladies 
 of Death, or the funereal descriptions of 
 the shadowy abode of the Lady of Sor- 
 row — the imagination of Thomson was 
 always approaching i^s ideal and reinforc- 
 ing its art for the masterwork of the The 
 City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 In the proem is announced the double 
 purpose of the allegory : " To show the 
 bitter, old and naked truth " as it appears 
 to the view of the pessimist, and to console 
 in some degree the brethren of the great 
 " Freemasonry of Sorrow," by the grip and 
 password of initia^ sympathy. And there 
 is a tinge of satisfaction and exclusiveness 
 
XXII INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in the poet's declaration that none who 
 have content or hope for reason of this 
 world or the other, could " read the writing 
 if they deigned to try."' Surely there are 
 few persons who have not learned by expe- 
 rience of sorrow, even though refusing to 
 let one's individual cloud discredit the sun. 
 The attempt may be modestly made, at 
 least, to spell out the hyacinthine hiero- 
 glyphics that inscribe woe upon the pages 
 of the poem. And it may be that non-per- 
 suasion will leave the reader more at lib- 
 erty to appreciate its extraordinary literary 
 merit. 
 
 The atmosphere of The City of Dreadful 
 Night is symbolic of the unrelieved gloom 
 of pessimism ; its dwellers typify those who 
 habitually despond, admitting no consola- 
 tion or hope. The poet asserts the power 
 of hypochondria to materialize its frightful 
 imaginings. 
 
 But when a dream night after night is brought 
 Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many 
 Recur each year for several years, can any 
 
 Discern that dream from real life in aught ? 
 
 The simple verity of the pathetic plea 
 cannot fail to awaken compassion for the 
 sufferings of Thomson and admiration of 
 
INTRODUCTION, XXIII 
 
 the literary art which could so steadily de- 
 pict the images of his vast discouragement. 
 
 The scenery of the city is varied; the sul- I 
 len lagoon and marsh, the savage forests r 
 and the torrents running downward through I, 
 black ravines, are its sombre environment,!, 
 allegorical of despair in its apathetic or its ' 
 violent forms. The streets of the city are 
 lined with ancient ruins or with houses in- 
 habited, but showing no light through their 
 black casements. Only the street lamps 
 burn — as Thomson saw them, a perspec- 
 tive of innumerable points of sharp fire, as 
 he walked through London at night. 
 
 " The City is of Night but not of Sleep," 
 it is the home of insomnia, with all its at- 
 tendant terrors. We may not overlook the 
 pathological origin of the poem. The tech- 
 nical construction of the allegory includes 
 a principal verse-form employed in the pas- 
 sages which describe the common doom of 
 the people, hopeless under the hand of 
 Necessity. Its metre is a seven-line 
 stanza, to which the double rhymes of the 
 fifth and sixth lines give a peculiar tender- 
 ness. In the episodes, where individuals 
 are heard as the spokesmen of a whole sad 
 company, various metres are adopted with 
 appropriateness to the passion expressed. 
 
XXIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The general design is at once elaborate 
 and somewhat fragmentary; a series of pow- 
 erful visions, not without mathematical 
 correspondences of structure, convey the 
 allegory. 
 
 Despair is above all egoistic ; therefore 
 every figure met by the poet in those for- 
 lorn streets is an image of himself, and 
 gives voice to one or another phase of his 
 mood. The first of these citizens is a man 
 whose faith was buried in a graveyard, and 
 whose love and hope were departed in their 
 turn. He remains deprived of all aim in 
 life, which for him runs on like the mechan- 
 ism of a watch without dial or hands. 
 
 The poet describes the new power of his 
 visual nerve by which he can perceive " a 
 stir of black in blackness," and the sharp- 
 ened hearing that reports the pulsations of 
 silence. Then he comes upon a man who 
 is relating to a shadowy crowd of listeners 
 his strange journey ; each stanza is intro- 
 duced by the impressive repetition : 
 
 As I came through tlie desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert. 
 
 (Perhaps there is no need to point out 
 a degree of resemblance of this episode to 
 Browning's (Jhilde Roland. Thomson was 
 receptive and even imitative, yet had no 
 
INTRODUCTION. XXV 
 
 lack of vigorous originality which was able 
 to give a new stamp to his borrowings.) 
 There in the w ^ste land, among the savage 
 crags of a wild seacoast, between a burnt- 
 out sun and a fallen moon, the traveler 
 meets a woman, carrying in her hand a red 
 lamp, which is no less than her own burn- 
 ing heart. She has been identified by Mr. 
 Salt as "the phantom-figure of the lost 
 love " of the poet ; and this interpretation 
 has the double authority of intelligence and 
 of affection. But it is not easy to imagine 
 the transformation of the golden-haired 
 child into this tragic woman. Rather, the 
 lamp-bearer appears like a demi-goddess, a 
 Lady of Death, who carries away her lov- 
 er's self from himself, in a mad division of 
 identity. 
 
 Next, the poet overhears a dialogue of 
 two persons who have failed of admittance 
 at the gates of death because they lacked 
 the coin of the toll — a last hope to leave 
 behind. Another pair reason concerning 
 Fate, whether she is malign, a hater of men, 
 or simply indifferent. Then with noise 
 of heavy wheels and clangor of iron-shod 
 hoofs, as in the London streets, great wains 
 go by, bearing away, — who knows ? — all the 
 good that might have been for mankind. 
 
XXVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Now the wanderer approaches a house, 
 draped with black, from whose windows — 
 alone of all the city — streams a light of 
 funeral lamps. This episode is another 
 reference to the story in the Arabian Nights 
 which so deeply impressed Thomson. In 
 the oratory of this house of mourning, of 
 which every room holds a shrine where ta- 
 pers burn before a statue or a picture of 
 the same woman, "very young and very 
 fair " a youth kneels praying beside the bier 
 where lies the dead Lady of the Images. 
 In this chapelle ardetite is the celebration of 
 the early sorrow of the poet, the worship of 
 the love that he had not the strength to lift 
 ^p from the earth to the stars. 
 
 In a remarkable passage, to which refer- 
 ence has already been made, the poet anat- 
 omizes the melancholy of the " rational and 
 yet insane " dwellers in the City of Night. 
 Now they at the door of the great cathe- 
 dral of their town attest each his right to 
 citizenship, since they from the illusions of 
 power, art, wealth, virtue, vice, knowledge, 
 patriotism, "wake from daydreams to this 
 real night." 
 
 Within the sinister temple the poet med- 
 itates upon the folly of those who, hating 
 time, yet crave eternity ; and then hears 
 
INTRODUCTION. XXVII 
 
 the voice of the preacher who bids his sad 
 people take comfort from the assurance of 
 the oblivion of the tomb, and declares that 
 Fate knows neither favor nor wrath. One 
 in the congregation persists in arraigning 
 life for the chances of happiness proffered 
 and frustrated, to which the preacher can 
 only repeat his doctrine of oblivion. The 
 poet, ranging in thought among other 
 spheres, finds only infinite room for despair 
 and for compassion. He returns to the 
 sights of the City where he perceives a man 
 groping upon the ground in search of the 
 golden clue that shall lead him backward 
 to the day of his birth; others seek the 
 lethal river of the suicides. 
 
 The succeeding allegory is very impres- 
 sive, wMch depicts the struggle of man-, 
 kind against Fate, ^nd the resultant defeat 
 and dejection. The cathedral is fiooded 
 now with moonlight ; in the open space be- 
 fore it crouches a Sphinx, half in shadow, 
 while an angel all in the full white splen- 
 dor, confronts the creature. In the first 
 shock of conflict the wings of the angel fall 
 shattered. He remains an armed warrior, 
 but his sword is broken at the second en- 
 counter. Lastly, he is a defenseless man, 
 praying with uplifted hands, and is crushed 
 
XXVIII INTRODUCTION. 
 
 by the unalterable sphinx. These meta- 
 morphoses ( as Mr. Salt has well interpreted 
 them ) may be taken to represent the three 
 phases through which the poet's mind had 
 passed in relation to the mysteries of ex- 
 istence ; first, the exaltation of religious be- 
 lief ; then the self-reliance of philosophy ; 
 then the hopelessness of complete despair. 
 
 To the northward of the City of Dread- 
 ful Night the bronze image of its tutelar 
 goddess sits upon a granite pedestal. She 
 is the tremendous Melencholia of Albrecht 
 Diirer, surrounded by the emblems of every 
 human science ; she has toiled and is baf- 
 fled at the end of the day, and the denial 
 of all things is in her eyes. To her the 
 dwellers of the tenebrous town look to ob- 
 tain new endurances or new terrors. She 
 confirms to all the old despair. 
 
 In the magnificent eleven stanzas which 
 describe this defeated Titan woman may be 
 found the summing-up of James Thomson's 
 whole philosophy of pessimism, expressed 
 with a fury of conviction able to fuse the 
 material into one great image, unique and 
 memorable. 
 
 E. CAVAZZA. 
 
 November, 1892. 
 
THE 
 CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT 
 
 1870; [874. 
 
" Per me si va nella citta dolente." 
 
 ' Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti 
 D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,- 
 Girando senza posa, 
 Per tornar sempre la donde son rnosse ; 
 Uso alcuno, alcun frutto 
 Indovinar non so." 
 
 Dante 
 
 Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve 
 
 Ogni creata cosa, 
 
 In te, morte, si posa 
 
 Nostra ignuda natura ; 
 
 Lieta no, ma sicura 
 
 Deir antico dolor. . . . 
 
 Pero ch' esser beato 
 
 Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato." 
 
 — Leopardi. 
 
THE 
 CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT. 
 
 1870; 1874. 
 
 PROEM. 
 
 LO, thus, as prostrate, " In the dust I write 
 My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.' 
 Yet why evoke the spectres of black night 
 To blot the sunshine of exultant ypafs ? 
 Why disinter d^d faith from mouldering hidden ? 
 Why break the seals of mute d espa ir unbidden. 
 And wail life's discords into careless ears ? 
 
 Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles 
 To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth 
 
 Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, 
 False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth : 
 
 Because it gives some sense of power and passion 
 
 In helpless impotence to try to fashion 
 Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth. 
 
4 The City of Dreadful Night, 
 
 Surely I write not for the hopeful young, 
 
 Or those who deem their happiness of worth. 
 
 Or such as^ pasture and grow fat among 
 
 The s hows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth, 
 
 Or pious spirits with a God above them 
 
 To sanctify and glorify and love them. 
 Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth. 
 
 For none of these I write, and none of these 
 Could read the writing if they deigned to try : 
 
 So may they flourish, in their due degrees, 
 On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky. 
 
 If any cares for the weak words here written. 
 
 It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten, 
 
 Whose faith and hope are de^d, and who would die. 
 
 Yes, here and there some weary wanderer 
 In that same city of tremendous night, 
 
 Will understand the speech, and feel a stir 
 Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight ; 
 
 " I suffer mute and lonely, yet another 
 
 jUplifts his voice to let me know a brother 
 
 Travels the same wild paths though out of sight." 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 O sad Fraterni ty^do I unfold 
 
 Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore ? 
 Nay, be assured ; no secret can be told 
 
 To any who divined it not before : 
 None uninitiate by many a presage 
 Will comprehend the language of the message, 
 
 Although proclaimed aloud forevermore. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 / I i/ 
 
 THE City is o| Nfght; perchance of Q^th, ^ 
 But cert^nly of Night ; for never there ^ 
 Can come th^luci^ morning's fragrant breath 
 
 After the, dewy dawning's cold grey air ; 
 The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity ; 
 The sun has never visited that city, 
 For it dissolveth in the daylight fair. 
 
 Dissolveth like a dream of night away ; 
 
 Though present in distempered gloom of thought 
 And deadly weariness of heart all day. 
 
 But when a dream night after night is brought 
 Throughout a week, and such we^ks few or many 
 Recur each ye^r for several ;^^rs, can any 
 
 Discern that dream from real life in aught .'' 
 
 For life is but a dream whose shapes return, 
 Some frequently, some seldom, some by night 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 And some by day, some night and day : we learn, 
 
 The while all change and many vanish quite, 
 In their recurrence with recurrent changes 
 A certain seeming order ; where this ranges 
 We count things real ; such is memory's might. 
 
 A river girds the city west and south, 
 
 The main north channel of a broad lagoon, 
 
 Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth ; 
 Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon 
 
 For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges ; 
 
 Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges, 
 Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn. 
 
 Upon an easy slope it lies at large. 
 
 And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest 
 
 Which swells out two leagues from the river marge. 
 A trackless wilderness rolls north and west. 
 
 Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains. 
 
 Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains ; 
 And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest. 
 
8 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 The city is not ruinous, although 
 
 (Treat ruins of an unremembered past, 
 
 With others of a few short y^^s ago 
 
 More sad, are found within its precincts vast. 
 
 The street-lamps always burn ; but scarce a casement 
 
 In house or palace front from roof to basement 
 Doth glow or deam athwart the mirk air cast. 
 
 The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms, 
 Amidst the soundless solitudes immense 
 
 Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. 
 The silence which benumbs or strains the sense 
 
 Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping : 
 
 Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping. 
 Or deid, or tied from nameless pestilence ! 
 
 Yet as in some necropolis you find 
 
 Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, 
 
 So there ; worn fac es that l ook d^af and blind 
 Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread, 
 
 Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 9 
 
 Or sit foredone and desolately ponder 
 
 Through sleepless JjetTrs with heavy drooping head. 
 
 Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth, '^' 
 
 A woman rarely, now and then a child : 
 A child ! If here the heart turns sick with ruth 
 
 To see a little one from birth defiled, 
 Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish 
 Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish 
 
 To meet one erring in that homeless wild. 
 
 They often murmur to themselves, they speak 
 
 To one another seldom, for their woe 
 Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak 
 
 Itself abroad ; and if at whiles it grow 
 To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour, 
 Unless there waits some victim of like g;l_amour, 
 
 To rave in turn, who lends attentive show. <S^ *^fl/»tf**-*-*^4 
 
 t^ 
 
 The City is of Night, but not of Sleep ; 
 
 There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain 
 
 ^ 
 
lo The City of Dreadful Ni^ht. 
 
 The pitiless hc<urs like years and ages creep, 
 
 A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain 
 
 Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, 
 
 Or which some moments' stupor but increases, 
 
 This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane. 
 
 ^--' ■ 
 They leave all hope behind who enter there : -' "' 
 
 One certitude while sane they cannot leave, 
 One anodyne for torture and despair ; 
 
 The certitude of E^th, which no reprieve 
 Can put off long; and which, divinely tender, 
 But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render 
 
 That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.' 
 
 1 Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers 
 withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark 
 clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy Jliand, which 
 may pluck of them when it will. 
 
Thf City of Dreadful Nighi. 
 
 II 
 
 BECAUSE he seemed to walk with an. intent 
 I followed him ; who, shadowlike and frail, 
 Unswervingly though slowly onward went. 
 
 Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil : 
 Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet 
 We travelled many a long dim silent street. 
 
 At length he paused : a black mass in the gloom, 
 A tower that merged into the heavy sky ; 
 
 Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb : 
 Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty : 
 
 He murmured to himself with dull despair, 
 
 Here Faith dib^d, poisoned by this charnel air. 
 
 Then turning to the right went on once more, 
 And travelled weary roads without suspense ; 
 
 And reached at last a low wall's open door, 
 
 Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense : 
 
12 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair, 
 
 Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair. 
 
 Then turning to the right resumed his march, 
 
 And travelled streets and lanes with wondrous strength 
 
 Until on stooping through a narrow arch 
 We stood before a squalid house at length : 
 
 He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair. 
 
 Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair. 
 
 When he had spoken thus, before he stirred, 
 I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs 
 
 Of desolation I had seen and heard 
 
 In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines : 
 
 When Faith and Love and Hope are d^ad indeed. 
 
 Can Life still live ? By what doth it proceed "i 
 
 As whom his one intense thought overpowers, 
 He answered coldly. Take a watch, erase 
 
 The signs and figures of the circling hojtrrs, 
 Detach the hands, remove the dial-face ; 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 13 
 
 The works proceed until run down ; although 
 Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go. 
 
 Then turning to the right paced on again. 
 
 And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms 
 Seemed more and more familiar to my ken ; 
 
 And reached that sullen temple of the tombs ; 
 And paused to murmur with the old despair, 
 Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air. 
 
 I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt 
 
 Was severed sharply with a cruel knife : 
 He circled thus forever tracing out 
 
 The series of the fraction left of Life ; 
 Perpetual recurrence ifi the scoj)e 
 Of but three terms, (^d Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.' 
 
 Life divided by that persistent three = ^t5^-~ •210 
 
 333 
 
 J 
 
1 4 The City of Dreadful Night, 
 
 III 
 
 ALTHOUGH lamps burn along the silent streets : 
 Even when moonlight silvers emptj' squares 
 The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats ; 
 
 But when the night its sphereless mantle wears 
 The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal, 
 The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal, 
 The lanes are black as subterranean lairs. 
 
 And soon the eye a strange new vision learns : 
 ^^^ The night remains for it as dark and dense, 
 
 i 'Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns 
 
 As in the daylight with its natural sense ; 
 ' Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely, 
 Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely, 
 Sees spectres also in the gloom intense. 
 
 ijf, The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep 
 frU^ Becomes familiar though unreconciled ; 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 15 
 
 Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep, 
 And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild, 
 
 Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision ; 
 
 But all more dubious than the things of vision. 
 So that it knows not when it is beguiled. 
 
 No tira€ abates the first despair and awe, 
 But wonder ceases soon ; the weirdest thing 
 
 Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law 
 Where Beath-in-Life is the eternal king ; 
 
 Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror, 
 
 Dazed with such mysteries of woe and error, 
 
 The soul is top outworn for wondering. , 
 
 ^- ^^-^^_. ^^^^ / ^ 
 
/->'■ 
 
 1 6 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 IV 
 
 HE stood alone within the spacious square /\ 
 Declaiming from the central grassy mound, ) 
 With head uncovered and with streaming hair, 
 As if large multitudes were gathered round : 
 A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might, 
 The glances burning with unnatural light : — 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 
 As I came through the desert : All was black, 
 
 In heaven no single star, on earth no track; 
 
 A brooding hush without a stir or note, ■'., 
 
 The air so thick it clotted in my throat ; 
 
 And thus for hours ; then some enormous things 
 
 Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings : 
 
 But I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : Eyes of fire 
 Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire ; 
 The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath 
 Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death ; 
 Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold 
 Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold : 
 
 But I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : Lo you, there, 
 That hillock burning with a brazen glare ; 
 Those myriad dusky flg.mes with points a-glow 
 Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro ; 
 A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell 
 For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell : 
 
 Yet I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
1 8 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 
 As I came through the desert : Meteors ran 
 
 And crossed their javeUns on the black sky-span; 
 
 The zenith opened to a gulf of tlame. 
 
 The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame ; 
 
 The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged 
 
 And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged : 
 
 Yet I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 
 As I came through the desert : Air once more. 
 
 And I was close upon a wild sea-shore ; 
 
 Enormous cliffs arose on either hand, 
 
 The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand ; 
 
 White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew; 
 
 The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue : 
 
 And I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : On the left 
 The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft ; 
 There stopped and burned out black, except a rim, 
 A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim ; 
 Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west, 
 And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest : 
 
 Still I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was. 
 As I came through the desert : From the right 
 A shape came slowly with a ruddy light ; 
 A woman with a red larnp in her hand. 
 Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand ; 
 O desolation moving with such grace ! 
 O anguish with such beauty in thy face ! 
 I fell as on my bier, 
 Hope travailed with such fear. 
 
20 llie City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : I was twain, 
 Two selves distinct that cannot join again ; 
 One stood apart and knew but could not stir, 
 And watched the other stark in swoon and her ; 
 And she came on, and never turned aside, 
 Between such sun and moon and roaring tide : 
 And as she came more near 
 My soul grew mad with fear. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was. 
 
 As I came through the desert : Hell is mild 
 
 And piteous matched with that accursbd wild ; 
 
 A large black sign was on her breast that bowed, 
 
 A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud 
 
 That lamp she held was her own burning heart, 
 
 Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart : 
 
 The mystery was clear ; 
 
 Mad rage had swallowed fear. 
 
 
The City of Dreadful Night 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : By the sea 
 She knelt and bent above that senseless me ; 
 Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there, 
 She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair ; 
 She murmured words of pity, love, and woe. 
 She heeded not the level rushing flow : 
 
 And mad with rage and fear, 
 I stood stonebound so near. 
 
 As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : When the tide 
 Swept up to her there kneeling by my side. 
 She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne 
 Away, and this vile me was left forlorn ; 
 I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart, 
 Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart : 
 They love ; their doom is drear, 
 Yet they nor hope nor fear ; 
 But I, what do I here ? 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 HOW he arrives there none can clearly know ; 
 Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts, 
 Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow, 
 Or down the river's boiling cataracts : 
 To reach it is as dying fever-stricken ; 
 To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken ; 
 And memory swoons in both the tragic acts. 
 
 But being there one feels a citizen ; 
 
 Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn : 
 Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again ? 
 
 And yet release does come ; there comes a morn 
 When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly 
 That all the world is changed for him completely, 
 
 And he is verily as if new-born. 
 
 He scarcely can believe the blissful change. 
 
 He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst ; 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 23 
 
 Never again will he approach the range 
 
 Infected by that evil spell now burst : 
 Poor wretch ! who once hath paced that dolent city 
 Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity, 
 
 With horror ever deepening from the first. 
 
 Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife, 
 A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered, 
 
 And love them more than d^th or happy life, 
 They shall avail not ; he must dree his weird ; 
 
 Renounce all blessings for that imprecation, 
 
 Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation. 
 Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared. 
 
24 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 VI 
 
 I sat forlornly by the river-side, 
 And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars 
 Above the blackness of the swelling tide, 
 
 Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars ; 
 And heard the heave and plashing of the How 
 Against the wall a dozen feet below. 
 
 Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk ; 
 
 And under one, a few steps from my seat, 
 I heard strange voices join in stranger talk, 
 
 Although I had not heard approaching feet : 
 These bodiless voices in my waking dream 
 Flowed dark words blending with the sombre stream : — 
 
 And you have after all come back ; come back. 
 
 I was about to follow on your track. 
 
 And you have failed : our spark of hope is black. 
 
The- City of Dreadful Kight. 25 
 
 That I haye_failprl is proved by my Eetlirnj ''-'' 'J^^ 
 The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn. 
 But listen ; and the story you shall learn. 
 
 I reached the portal common spirits fear, 
 And read the words above it, dark yet clear. 
 " Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here : " 
 
 And would have passed in, gratified to gain 
 That positive eternity of pain, 
 Instead of this insufferable inane. 
 
 A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast; -' 
 
 First leave your hopes behind ! — But vears have passed 
 
 Since I left all behind me, to the last : 
 
 You cannot count for hope with all your wit, 
 This bleak despa ir that drives me to the Pit : 
 How could I seek to enter void of it ? 
 
 He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul, 
 And would find entrance to our gulf of dole 
 Without the payment of the settled toll ? 
 
26 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 Outside the gate he showed an open chest : 
 Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest ; 
 Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest. 
 
 This is Pandora's box ; whose lid shall shut, 
 And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it ; but 
 They are so thin that it will never glut. 
 
 I stood a few steps backwards, desolate ; 
 And watched the spirits pass me to their fate. 
 And fling off hope, and enter at the gate. 
 
 When one casts off a load he springs upright. 
 Squares back his shoulders, breathes with all his might. 
 And briskly paces forward strong and light : 
 
 But these, as if they took some burden, bowed ; 
 The whole frame sank ; however strong and proud 
 Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed. 
 
 And as they passed me, earnestly from each 
 
 A morsel of his hope I did beseech. 
 
 To pay my entrance ; but all mocked my speech. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 27 
 
 Not one would cede a tittle of his store, 
 Though knowing that in instants three or four 
 He must resign the whole for evermore. 
 
 So I returned. Our destiny is fell ; 
 
 For in this Limbo we must ever dwell, 
 
 Shut out alike from Heaven and Earth and Hell, 
 
 The other sighed back, Yea ; but if we grope 
 With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope, 
 We yet may pick up some minute lost hope ; 
 
 And, sharing it between us, entrance win. 
 In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin : 
 Let us without delay our search begin. 
 
 I 
 
u-^^r'"' 
 
 28 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 VII 
 
 SOME say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets, 
 And mingle freely there with sparse mankind ; 
 And tell of ancient woes and black defeats, 
 . And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined : 
 But others think them visions of illusion, 
 Or even men gone far in self-confusion ; 1* ; 
 
 No man there being wholly sane in mind. ■ 
 
 And yet a man who raves, however mad, 
 
 Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall, 
 
 Reserves some inmost secret good or bad : 
 The phantoms have no reticence at all : 
 
 The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless, 
 
 The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless, 
 The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall. 
 
 I have seen phantoms there 'that were as men 
 And men that were as phantoms flit and roam ; 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 29 
 
 Marked shapes that were not living to my ken, 
 
 Caught breathings acrid as with Qd^d Sea foam : 
 The City rests for man so weird and awful, 
 That his intrusion there might seem unlawful, 
 
 And phantoms there may have their proper home. 
 
 
\'' 
 
 30 7^/^^ Ctty of Dreadful Alight. 
 
 VIII 
 
 WHILE T still lingered on that river-walk^. .-" V-^/^ 
 And watched the tide as black as our black doom, 
 I heard another couple join in talk, 
 
 And saw them to the left hand in the gloom 
 Seated against an elm bole on the ground, 
 Their eyes intent upon the stream profound. 
 
 " I never knew another man on earth 
 
 But had some joy and solace in his life, 
 Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife : ^ 
 My doom has been unmitigated dearth." > 
 
 " We gaze upon the river, and we note 
 The various vessels large and small that float. 
 Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat." 
 
 " And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil 
 Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth ; 
 

 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 But homely love with common food and health. 
 And nightly sleep to balance daily toil." 
 
 This ail-too humble soul would arrogate 
 Unto itself some signalizing hate 
 From the supreme indifference of Fate 
 
 H-^' 
 
 
 M^ 
 
 Who is most wretched in this dolorous place ? ' 
 
 . think myself ; yet I would rather be l^--^^^^""^ ^ 
 
 My miserable self than He, than He * \ | 
 
 Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace. I ^ ^ 
 
 The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou 
 From whom it had its being, God and Lord ! 
 Creator of all woe and sin ! abhorred. 
 
 Malignant and implacable ! I vow 
 
 ' That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled. 
 For all the temples to Thy glory built, 
 Would I assume the ignominious guilt 
 Of having made such men in such a world." /' 
 
32 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 " As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign, 
 At once so wicked, foolish, and insane, 
 As to produce men when He might refrain I 
 
 " The world rolls round forever like a mill ; 
 It grinds out dfe^th and life and good and ill ; 
 It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. 
 
 / 
 
 " While air of Space and 'Hriie's full river flow 
 
 The mill must blindly whirl unresting so : 
 It may be wearing out, but who can know ? 
 
 " Man might know one thing were his sight less dim 
 That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, 
 That it is quite indifferent to him. 
 
 " Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith ? 
 It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath. 
 Then grinds him back into eternal death." 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 33 
 
 IX 
 
 IT is full strange to him who hears and feels, 
 When wandering there in some deserted street, 
 The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels, 
 The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet : 
 Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth ? 
 Who in this city of the stars abideth 
 
 To b<iy or $611 as those in daylight sweet.? 
 
 The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky 
 
 As it comes on ; the horses snort and strain, 
 
 The harness jingles, as it passes by; 
 
 The hugeness of an overburthened wain : 
 
 A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges 
 
 Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges : 
 And "SO it rolls into the night again. 
 
 What merchandise ? whence, whither, and for whom i 
 Ferchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse, 
 
 y 
 
34 The City of Dreadful AHght. 
 
 Bearing away to some mysterious tomb 
 
 Or Limbo of the scornful universe 
 The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions 
 Of all things gjDod which should have been our portions, 
 
 But have been strangled by that City's curse. 
 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 35 
 
 THE mansion stood apart in its own ground; 
 In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn, 
 High trees about it, and the whole walled round : 
 
 The massy iron gates were both withdrawn ; 
 And every window oi its front shed light, 
 Portentous in that City of the Night. 
 
 But though thus lighted it was deadly still 
 As all the countless bulks of solid gloom : 
 
 Perchance a congregation to fulfil 
 Solemnities of silence in this doom. 
 
 Mysterious rites of dolour and ^SSpair 
 
 Permitting not a breath of chant or prayer ? 
 
 Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad 
 Whereon lay still light from the open door ; 
 
 The hall was noble, and its aspect awed, 
 
 Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor ^ 
 
 ^.W 
 
 
36 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 And ample stairways rose to left and right 
 Whose balustrades were also draped with night. 
 
 I paced from room to room, from hall to hall. 
 
 Nor any life throughout the maze discerned ; 
 But each was hung with its funereal pall, 
 
 And held a shrine, around which tapers burned, 
 With picture or with statue or with bust. 
 All copied from the same fair form of dust : 
 
 A woman very young and very fair ; 
 
 Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth, 
 And loving these sweet lovers, so that care 
 
 And age and de^th seemed not for her in sooth 
 Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright, 
 These shapes lit up that mausole'an night. 
 
 At length I heard a murmur as of lips, 
 
 And reached an open oratory hung 
 With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse ; 
 
 Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung; 
 And one lay there upon a low white bed, 
 With tapers burning at the foot and head : 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 37 
 
 The Lady of the images : supine, 
 J Eji^thstill, lifesweet,^)\vith folded pahns she lay : 
 And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine 
 
 A young man wan and wor n who seemed to pray : 
 A crucifix of dim and ghostly white 
 Surmounted the large altar left in night : — 
 
 The chambers of the mansion of my heart, 
 In every one whereof thine image dwells, 
 Are black with grief eternal for thy sake. 
 
 The inmost oratory of my soul, ./^duxcx 
 
 Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or jiead, v« »^- ''..j. 
 
 Is black with grief eternal for thy sake. ^ 
 
 I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross. 
 With eyes forever fixed upon that face. 
 So beautiful and dreadful in its calm. 
 
 I kneel here patient as thou liest there ; 
 As patient as a statue carved in stone, 
 Of adoration and eternal grief. 
 
38 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 While thou dost not awake I cannot move ; 
 And something tells me thou wilt never wake, 
 And I alive feel turning into stone. 
 
 Most beautiful were Dea^h to end my grief, 
 Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee, 
 Dear vision better than all death or life. 
 
 But I renounce all choice of life or death. 
 For either shall be ever at thy side, 
 And thus in bliss or woe be ever well. — 
 
 He murmured thus and thus in monotone, 
 Intent upon that uncorrupted face, 
 
 Entranced except his moving lips alone : 
 
 I glided with hushed footsteps from the place. 
 
 This was the festival that filled with light 
 
 That palace in the City of the Night. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 39 
 
 XT 
 
 WHAT men are they who haunt these fatal glooms, 
 And fill their living mouths with dust of deith, 
 And make their habitations in the tombs, 
 
 And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath, 
 And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error 
 
 To reach that void of darkness and old terror , - / ' 
 
 ^ >~ ^ ■ — ^- — , — , — J ^- -^^ -t-' 
 
 Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith ? /'^^ J, 
 
 f 
 They have much wisdom yet they are not wise, 
 
 They have much goodness yet they do not well, 
 (The fools we knovv have their own Paradise, 
 
 The wicked also have their proper Hell) ; 
 They have much strength but Sitiit their doom is stronger, 
 Much patience but their time endureth longer, 
 
 Much valour but life mocks it with some spell. 
 
 They are mo st rational and yet insane : 
 
 An outward madness not to be controlled ; 
 
IV^uzb ±as lii.' loomsr. inn :sirtgrf wan joaxl xoiii. 
 
 ESSE: rgtisng: :n 
 
 ■l\-Kt ;SaWt -HEe ;SXG9I 
 
 il3ui:£om±r renowttSi: 
 
 -Al l>«Mnvi of iifp : TJS: JiiSSt anr tllQSt .315: iirOtttSSi " 
 
 t 
 
 ti 
 
Tkt City of nr"t!fu: i\tgkt 
 
 XII 
 
 OUR isolated units could b« brought - 
 
 To act together for some common end " 
 For one by one. each silent with his thought. 
 
 I marked a long loose line approach and wenc 
 Athwart the great cathedral s clot5t«red square. 
 And slowly vanish from the raoonlit air. -' 
 
 ^ i- > 
 
 Then I would follow in among the las- 
 
 .\nd in the porch a shrouded Agure stood. 
 Who challenged eac^i one pausing ere he passed. 
 
 With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood 
 Whence come you in the world of life and light 
 To this our City of Tremendous Xight ? — 
 
 From plead 
 Fqrjome - 
 Who toil 
 
 ng in a senate of ndi lord 
 
 r to our cointlesi -i jraes 
 . Arith scarce a human right : 
 
 J wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
42 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 From wandering throuc^h many a solemn scene 
 
 Of opium visions, with a heart serene 
 
 And intellect miraculously bright : 
 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee 
 By my transcendent feats of mimicry, 
 And humour wanton as an elfish sprite : 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell, 
 Which brought an ecstasy ineffable 
 Of love and adoration and delight : 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From ruling on a splendid kingly throne 
 A nation which beneath my rule has grown 
 Year after year in wealth and arts and might : 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From preaching to an audience fired with faith 
 The Lamb who died to save our souls from death. 
 
The City nf Dreadful Nij^hi. 43 
 
 Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white : , 
 f wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 (' 
 From drinking fiery poison in a den 
 Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men. 
 Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight : 
 [ wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From picturing with all beauty and all grace 
 First Eden and the parents of our race, 
 A luminous rapture unto all men's sight : 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From writing a great work with patient plan 
 To justify the ways of God to man, 
 And show hoW ill must fade and perish quite : 
 1 wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
 From desperate fighting with a little band 
 Against the powerful tyrants of our land. 
 To jree ou r brethren in their own despite : 
 I wake from daydreams to this real night. 
 
44 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern, 
 Each one responded with his countersign, 
 
 Then entered the cathedral ; and in turn 
 T entered also, having given mine ; 
 
 But lingered near until I heard no more. 
 
 And marked the closing of the massive door. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 45 
 
 XIII 
 
 OF all things human which are strange and wild 
 This is perchance the wildest and most strange, ^ , 
 And showeth man most utterly beguiled, 
 
 To those who haunt that sunless City's range ; 
 That he bemgans himself for aye, repeating 
 How Ty3flf€ is d^^ly swift, how life is fleeting, 
 How naught is constant on the earth but change. 
 
 The hours are heavy on him and the days : 
 
 The burden of the months he scarce can bear ; 
 
 And often in his secret soul he prays 
 
 To sleep through barren periods unaware. 
 
 Arousing at some Iqnged-for date of pleasure : 
 
 Which having passed and yielded him small treasure, 
 He would outsleep another term of care. 
 
 Yet in his marvellous fapcy he must make 
 Quick wings for Tifne, and see it fly from us ; 
 
46 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 This Tinj€ which crawleth like a monstrous snake, 
 Wotinded and slow and very venomous ; 
 
 Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean, 
 
 Distilling poison at each painful motion. 
 And seems condemned to circle ever thus. 
 
 And since he cannot spend and use aright 
 
 The little time here given him in trust, 
 But wasteth it in weary undelight 
 
 Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust. 
 He naturally claimeth to inherit 1'^/-'"'^ i 
 
 The everlasting Future, that his merit ' {■ 
 
 May have fuU^cope; as surely is most just. 
 
 O length of the intolerable hc^urs, 
 
 O nights that are as aeons of slow pain, 
 O Tifne, too ample for our vital powers, 
 
 O Life, whose woeful vanities remain 
 Immutable for all of all our legions 
 Through all the centuries and in all the regions. 
 
 Not of your speed and variance we complain. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 47 
 
 We do not ask a longer term of strife, 
 Weakness and weariness and nameless woes ; 
 
 We do not claim renewed and endless life 
 
 When this which is our torment here shall close. 
 
 An everlasting conscious inanition ! 
 
 We yeaxn for speedy d^th in full fruition, 
 Dateless oblivion and divine repose. 
 
 VV^^ 
 
 
 S^^i*^- 
 
 J^ 
 
 LC 
 
 U-^ *" 
 
 Jj.^i'-'^ 
 
48 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 XIV 
 
 LARGE glooms were gathered in the mighty fane. 
 With tinted moongleams slanting here and there; 
 And all was hush : no swelling organ-strain, 
 
 No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer; 
 No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,»_»_ 
 And the high altar space was unillumed. 
 
 Around the pillars and against the walls 
 
 Leaned men and shadows ; others seemed to brood 
 
 Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls. 
 
 Perchance they were not a great multitude 
 
 Save in that city of so lonely streets 
 
 Where one may count up every face he meets. 
 
 All patiently awaited the event 
 
 Without a stir or sound, as if no less 
 
 1 
 
 Self^occupied, doomstricken, while attent. 
 And then we heard a voice of solemn stress 
 
The City of Dreadfid Night. 49 
 
 From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met 
 Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet : 
 
 Two steadfast and intolerable eyes 
 
 Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow ; 
 
 The head behind it of enormous size. 
 
 And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow, 
 
 Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed. 
 
 By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed : — 
 
 O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark ! 
 O battling in black floods without an ark ! 
 
 O spectral wanderers of unholy Night ! 
 My soul hath bled for you these sunless jji^ars. 
 With bitter blood-drops running down like tears : 
 
 Oh, dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light ! 
 
 My heart is sick with anguish for your bale ; 
 Your woe hath been my anguish ; yea, I quail 
 
 And perish in your perishing unblest. 
 And I have searched the highths and depths, th e scop e 
 Of all our universe, with desperate hope 
 
 To find some solace for your wild unrest. 
 
50 I'he City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 And now at last authentic word I bring, 
 Witnessed by every d^d and living thing ; 
 Good tidings of great joy for you, for all : 
 / There is no God ; no FienH^vTlTii names divine 
 Made us and tortures us ; if we must pine, 
 It is to satiate no Being's gall. 
 
 It was the dark delusion of a dream, 
 That living Person conscious and supreme, 
 
 Whom we must curse for cursing us with life 
 Whom we must curse because the life He gave 
 Could not be buried in the quiet grave, 
 
 Could not be killed by poison or by knife. 
 
 This little life is all we must endure, 
 The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,' 
 
 We fall asleep and never wake again ; 
 Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh. 
 Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh 
 
 In earth, air, water, plants, and other men. w^^A 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 5 1 
 
 We finish thus ; and all our wretched race 
 Shall finish with its cycle, and give plaice 
 
 To other beings, with their own time-doom : 
 Infinite aeons ere our kind began ; 
 Infinite aeons after the last man 
 
 Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb. 
 
 We bow down to the universal laws, 
 Which never had for man a special clause 
 
 Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate : 
 If toads and vultures are obscene to sight. 
 If tigers burn with beauty and with might, 
 
 Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate ? 
 
 All substance lives and struggles evermore 
 Through countless shapes continually at war, 
 
 By Cflun tie.'is interactions interknit : 
 If one is born a certain day on earth. 
 All titees and forces tended to that birth, 
 
 Not all the world could change or hinder it. 
 
5 2 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 I find no hint throughout the Universe 
 Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse ; 
 
 I find alone Necessity Supreme ; 
 With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, 
 Unlighted ever by the faintest spark 
 
 For us the flitting shadows of a dream. 
 
 O Brothers of s^d lives ! they are so brief ; 
 A few short years must bring us all relief : 
 
 Can we not bear these years of labouring breath ? 
 But if you would not this poor life fulfil, 
 Lo, you are free to end it when you will, 
 
 Without the fear of waking after death. — 
 
 The organ-like vibrations of his voice 
 
 Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away ; 
 The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice 
 
 Was sad and tender as a requiem lay : 
 Our shadowy congregation rested still 
 As brooding on that " End it when you will." 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 53 
 
 XV 
 
 WHEREVER men are gathered, all the air 
 Is charged with human feeUng, human thought : 
 Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer, 
 
 Are into its vibrations surely wrought ; 
 Unspoken passion, wordless meditation, 
 Are breathed into it with our respiration ; 
 It is with our life fraught and overfraught. 
 
 So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath, 
 
 As if alone on mountains or wide seas ; 
 But nourishes warm life or hastens death 
 
 With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease, 
 Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours, 
 Incessant of his multitudinous neighbours ; 
 
 He in his turn affecting all of these. 
 
 That City's atmosphere is dark and dense. 
 Although not many exiles wander there, 
 
54 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 With many a potent evil influence, 
 
 Each adding poison to the poisoned air ; 
 Infections of unutterable sadness, 
 Infections of incalculable madness, 
 Infections of incurable despair. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 55 
 
 XVI 
 
 OUR shadowy congregation rested still, 
 As musing on that message we had heard 
 And brooding on that " End it when you will ; " 
 
 Perchance awaiting yet some other word ; 
 When keen as lightning through a muffled sky 
 Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry : — 
 
 The man speaks sooth, alas ! the man speaks sooth : 
 We have no personal life beyond the grave ; 
 
 There is no God ; Fate knows nor wrath nor r uth : 
 Can I find here the comfort which I crave ? 
 
 In all eternity I had one chance, 
 
 One few years' term of gracious human life : 
 The splendours of the intellect's advance. 
 
 The sweetness of the home with babes and wife ; 
 
 ■■ ' " ' ■ ■ " ■II III. , mm-mamtt0 
 
 The social pleasures with their genial wit ; 
 The fascination of the worlds of art, 
 
56 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 The glories of the worlds of nature, lit 
 By large imagination's glowing heart ; 
 
 The rapture of mere being, full of health ; 
 
 The careless childhood and the ardent youth, 
 The strenuous manhood winning various wealth, 
 
 The reverend age serene with life's long truth : 
 
 All the sublime prerogatives of Man ; 
 
 The storied memories of the times of old, 
 The patient tracking of the world's gi-eat plan 
 
 Through sequences and changes myriadfold. 
 
 This chance was never offered me before ; 
 
 For me the infinite Past is blank and dumb : 
 This chance recurreth never, nevermore ; 
 
 Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. 
 
 And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth, 
 A mockery, a delusion ; and my breath 
 
 Of noble human life upon this earth 
 
 So racks me that I sigh for senseless death. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 57 
 
 My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, 
 My noonday passes in a nightmare dream, 
 
 T worse than lose the years which are my all : 
 What can console me for the loss supreme ? 
 
 Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, 
 
 Speak not at all : can words make foul things fair? 
 
 Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss : 
 Hush and be mute envisaging despair. — 
 
 This vehement voice came from the northern aisle 
 Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close ; 
 
 And none gave answer for a certain while, 
 
 For words must shrink from these most wordless woes ; 
 
 At last the pulpit speaker simply said, 
 
 With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head : — 
 
 My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus ; 
 This life itself holds nothing good for us, 
 
 But it ends soon And nevermore can be ; 
 And we knew nothing of it ere our birth, 
 And shall know nothing when consigned to earth : 
 
 I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me. 
 
..^s 
 
 58 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 t'' 
 
 XVII 
 
 HOW the moon triumphs through the endless nights ! 
 How the stars throb and gHtter as they wheel 
 Their thick processions of super nalj^ghts -7 ^q 
 
 Around the blue vault obdurate as steel ! 
 And men regard with passionate awe and yearning 
 The mighty marching and the golden burning, 
 And think the heavens respond to what they feel. 
 
 Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream, 
 
 Are glorified from vision as they pass 
 The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream ; 
 
 Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass 
 To restless crystals ; cornice, dome, and column 
 Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn ; 
 
 Like faery lakes gleam lawns of -dewT'grass. 
 
 With such a living light these dead eyes shine, 
 These eves of sightless heaven, that as we graze 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 59 
 
 We read a pity, tremulous, divine, 
 
 Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays : 
 
 Fond man I they are not haughty, are not tender ; 
 
 There is no heart or mind in all their splendour, 
 
 They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze. 
 
 If we could near them with the flight unflown, 
 We should but find them worlds as sad as this. 
 
 Or suns all self-consuming like our own 
 Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss : 
 
 They wax and wane through fusion and confusion : 
 
 The spheres eternal are a grand illusion, 
 The empyrean is a void abyss. 
 
 
6o The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 T wandered in a suburb of the north, 
 And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down, 
 Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth 
 
 Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown : 
 The air above was wan with misty light, 
 The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white. 
 
 I took the left-hand lane and slowly trod 
 
 Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went 
 The humid leafage ; and my feet were shod 
 
 With heavy languor, and my frame downbent, 
 With infinite sleepless weariness outworn, 
 So many nights I thus had paced forlorn. 
 
 After a hundred steps I grew aware 
 
 Of something crawling in the lane below ; 
 
 It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there 
 That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow, 
 
 The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then 
 
 To drag ; for it would (lie in its own den. 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 6i 
 
 But coming level with it I discerned 
 That it had been a man ; for at my tread 
 
 It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned, 
 Leaning upon its right, and raised its head, 
 
 And with the left hand twitched back as in ire 
 
 Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire. 
 
 A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes. 
 
 An infamy for manhood to behold. 
 He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize ? 
 
 You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold 
 And all that men go mad upon, since you 
 Have traced my sacred secret of the clue .' 
 
 You think that I am weak and must submit ; 
 
 Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade, 
 And you are 'ds^d as if I clove with it 
 
 That false fierce greedy heart. Betrayed ! betrayed ! 
 I fling this phial if you seek to pass, 
 And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass. 
 
 And then with sudden change, Take thought ! take thought ! 
 Have pity on me ! it is mine alone. 
 
If yoE couic find, i: would arail voc Taxj^rrr: . 
 
 5»eec eiseviie^ nr die paaswar of ynur otwe : 
 Fnr TOir a: mara!! or ammo-^ race 
 Tat {tiStaranc -cf anrojer cat reiraDe r 
 
 Ebf Tont 'bic tnov irj airorr aiir xnT 
 
 Tw: ^aneF drnerxje et Tr.-iuaer froir "zhi? iHiu 
 
 SuAc , 
 
 E .canun: i3m«Pt Ijiic utna c ;.: 
 
 Siir C arc ir dte ^phtt 'irar a: ias: 
 Ti' tnnt Af iicai|njMt iirifem ^^aOdfen tibrsaii 
 
 WSUkft. rt wimrfft ainr ^rssslSI WQC& BIT p9SL 
 
 k£ piix b}£: ^ ]paiir ':^«tl vanr. JLaS I sn&. 
 I wdl rainne ££ snni k jf^ix kave 4aiU 
 
 l£aifiec& ti&B£ iiostr tbffead of s«U. 
 
 It fieaAs Be baejk: 
 nBhsMKanonv 
 Am! efavsnglk the deserts vUdt l»i« cfee «» «»dL 
 
The Ctty of I>readful Ntghi. 
 
 And tnrou^ \-as: wastes of horroT-hairattd time 
 To Eden innocencs in Eden's ciime : 
 
 And I become a nursiing soft and pure. 
 An infant cradied on its Blather's knee. 
 
 Withoui a pas: ^aed and secure ; 
 
 Wfaict if it -. lisome present Me. 
 
 Would phmge its face into trie pillowing iireast 
 
 And scream abiunrence iiard to iuL to test. 
 
 He turned to grope : and 3 retrring fanished 
 Tiiir sirreds of gT>55anieT from off mv face. 
 
 And mused. His lite would grow, tite g^rm uncrusheC 
 3e siu)uid to antenatal nigitt retnact 
 
 And iiide iiis elemeng jf. tiia:t iargt : womi 
 
 Beyond tiie reach of maxj-evoiving Imnrr. 
 
 And even tiuis. wiia: wearv war were tiiuiirc- 
 Tc seek obiiviar tirrougfc tte far-off gatt 
 
 Of birtii. wtten that of dqttii is jUasst a: ^anr^ ; 
 Tax lis is taw. n iaw tbere i»e in Paee 
 
 What ne^^sT h^ ijeen. vet mar liave is wiier . 
 
 The tiung which iia? been, never s agam 
 
64 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 XIX 
 
 THE mighty river flowing dark and deep, i^^s-^W--^ 0\ 
 
 With ebb and flood from the rem(aie_S£a-tides ' 
 
 Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep. 
 
 Is named the River of the Suicides ; 
 For night by night some lorn wretch overweary, 
 And shuddering from the future yet more dreary, 
 Within its cold secure oblivion hides. 
 
 One plunges from a bridge's parapet, 
 
 As by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled ; 
 Another wades in slow with purpose set 
 
 Until the waters are above him furled ; 
 Another in a boat with dreamlike motion 
 Glides drifting down into the desertocgaaa, 
 
 To starve or sink from out the desert world. 
 
 They perish from their suffering surely thus. 
 For none beholding them attempts to save, 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 65 
 
 The while each thinks how soon, solicitous, 
 
 He may seek refuge in the self-same wave ; 
 Some h^r when tired of ever-vain endurance 
 Impafience will forerun the sweet assurance 
 Of perfect peace eventual in the grave. 
 
 When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long, 
 Why actors and spectators do we stay ? — 
 ^-^o fill our so-short roles out right or wrong ; 
 
 - - To see what shifts are yet in the dull play 
 
 For our illusion ; to refrain from grieving 
 
 Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving : 
 But those asleep at home, how blest are they ! 
 
 Yet it is but for one night after all : 
 
 What matters one brief night of dreary pain ? 
 
 When after it the weary eyelids fall 
 
 Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain ; 
 
 And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish 
 
 In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish. 
 That one best sleep which never wakes again. 
 
 k 
 
 ,7 
 
66 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 XX 
 
 I sat me weary on a pillar's base, 
 And leaned against the shaft ; for broad moonlight 
 O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space, 
 
 A shore of shadow slanting from the right : 
 The great cathedral's western front stood there, 
 A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air. 
 
 Before it, opposite my place of rest, 
 
 Two figures faced each other, large, austere ; ' Ji" 
 A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast. 
 
 An angel standing in the moonlight clear ; 
 So mighty by magnificence of form, 
 They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm. 
 
 Upon the cross-hilt of a naked sword 
 
 The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held ; 
 His vigilant, intense regard was poured 
 
 Upon the creature placidly unquelled, 
 
 \}-' 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 6 7 
 
 Whose front was set at level gaze which took 
 No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look. 
 
 And as I pondered these opposed shapes 
 My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon 
 
 Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes 
 The outworn to worse weariness. But soon 
 
 A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke, 
 
 And from the evil lethargy I woke. 
 
 The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone, 
 
 And lay there shattered ; hence the sudden sound : 
 
 A warrior leaning on his sword alone 
 
 Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound ; 
 
 The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware 
 
 Of nothing in the vast abyss of air. 
 
 Again I sank in that repose unsweet. 
 
 Again a clashing noise my slumber rent ; 
 The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet : 
 
 An unarmed man with raised hands impotent 
 Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept 
 Such mien as if with open eyes it slept. 
 
68 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown ; 
 
 A louder crash upstartled me in dread : 
 The man had fallen forward, stone on stone, 
 
 And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head 
 Between the monster's large quiescent paws, 
 Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws. 
 
 The moon had circled westward full and bright, 
 And made the temple-front a mystic dream, 
 
 And bathed the whole enclosure with its light, 
 The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme : 
 
 I pondered long that cold majestic face 
 
 Whose vision seemed of infinite void space. 
 
21ie City sf Dreadful Night. 69 
 
 XXI 
 
 A NEAR the center of that northern crest 
 Stands out a level upland bleak and bare, 
 From which the city east and south and west 
 
 Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there 
 An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman. 
 The bronze colossus of a winged Woman, 
 Upon a graded granite base foursquare. 
 
 Low-seated she leans forward massively, 
 
 With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might 
 Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee ; 
 
 Across a clasped book in her lap the right 
 Upholds a pair of compasses ; she gazes 
 With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes 
 
 Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight. 
 
70 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 Words cannot picture her ; but all men know 
 That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought 
 
 Three centuries and threescore v^ars ago, 
 With phantasies of his peculiar thought : 
 
 The instruments of carpentry and science 
 
 Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance 
 
 With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught ; 
 
 Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above ; 
 
 The grave and solid infant perched beside, 
 With open winglets that might bear a dove, 
 
 Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed ; 
 Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle, 
 But all too impotent to lift the regal 
 
 Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride ; 
 
 And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems 
 To mock her grand head and the knotted frown 
 
 Of forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams, 
 The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown 
 
 Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid 
 
 As if a shell of burnished metal frigid. 
 
 The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down : 
 
The City of Dreadful Night. 7 1 
 
 The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas, 
 
 The massy rainbow curved in front of it 
 Beyond the village with the masts and trees ; 
 
 The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit, 
 Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions 
 Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions, 
 
 The " Melencolia" that transcends all wit. 
 
 Thus has the artist copied her, and thus 
 Surrounded to expound her form sublime, 
 
 Her fate heroic and calamitous ; 
 
 Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time, 
 
 Unvanquished in defeat and desolation, 
 
 Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration 
 Of the day setting on her bafifled prime. 
 
 Baffled and beaten back she works on still. 
 Weary and sick of soul she works the more, 
 
 Sustained by her indomitable will : 
 
 The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore, 
 
 Andvall her sorrow shall be turned to labour, 
 
 Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre 
 That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war. 
 
72 The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 But as if blacker night could dawn on night, 
 
 With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred, 
 
 A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, 
 More desperate than strife with hope debarred, 
 
 More fatal than the adamantine Never 
 
 Encompassing her passionate endeavour, 
 Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard : 
 
 The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
 Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; 
 
 That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 
 Because they have no secret to express ; 
 
 That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
 
 Because there is no light beyond the curtain ; 
 That all is vanity and nothingness. 
 
 Titanic from her high throne in the north. 
 That City's sombre Patroness and Queen, 
 
 In bronze sublimity she gazes forth 
 Over her Capital of teen and threne, 
 
 Over the river with its isles and bridges, 
 
 The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-ridges, 
 Confronting them with a coeval mien. 
 
The City of Dreadful Nighf. 73 
 
 The moving moon and stars from east to west ' ■^ 
 
 Circle before her in the sea of air ; 
 Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest. 
 
 Her subjects often gaze up to her there : 
 The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance, 
 The. weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance 
 
 And confirmation of the old despair. 
 
 Ji^ 
 
 /o£ 
 
 
 ,>• 
 
 
 ^ Y (K^l^"" Ji "^^ 
 
 
 v/^l 
 
 
 
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APPENDIX 
 
Note. The impression made by The City of Dreadful 
 Night is deepened by the testimony of the two poems 
 appended : To Our Ladies of Death and Insomnia. The 
 former was published in 1861, the latter in 1882 ; while the 
 central and chief part of the trilogy was written during the 
 years 1870-74. Time, the friend of man and forerunner of 
 eternal life, was for this conquered soul a cruel enemy, 
 war-lord of " his days and months and years." 
 
 In the more youthful chant of desperation, he is 
 yet able to apotheosize Death — as in an antique moon- 
 myth — a goddess in heaven, in hell and on earth. Or 
 rather she has the three-fold divmity of Diana, whose gen- 
 tle darts give sleep; of Venus, the world's delight and 
 bane ; and of the solemn Proserpine crowned with lethal 
 poppies. In The City of Dreadful Night this pure fancy 
 appears to be succeeded by a singular power of clothing 
 grief — or its recurrent eidolons — in brilliant allegories. 
 
 At the end of two decades of endurance, Thomson's 
 verse became an outcry of tortured nerves. In the poem 
 Insomnia we find the author concerned with individual ex- 
 pression rather than with impersonation or with typical de- 
 sign. For him " life is one dark maze of dreams ; " and 
 " the sun-hours ... the star-hours," are the black or 
 lurid ridges of timeless Malebolge. The triune pathetic 
 record of the malady of his spirit must win for his mem- 
 ory at once admiration and pity. 
 
TO OUR LADIES OF DEATH.^ 
 1861. 
 
 ' Tired with all tliese, for restful deatii I cry." 
 
 — Shakespeare : Sonnet 1 
 
 WEARY of erring in this desert Life, 
 Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain, 
 Weary of struggling in all-sterile strife. 
 
 Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain, 
 I close my eyes and calm my panting breath, 
 And pray to Thee, O ever-quiet Death ! 
 To come and soothe away my bitter pain. 
 
 The strong shall strive, — may they be victors crowned ; 
 
 The wise still seek, — may they at length find Truth ; 
 The young still hope, — may purest love be found 
 
 To make their age more glorious than their youth. 
 For me; my brain is weak, my heart is cold, 
 My hope and faith long dead ; my life but bold 
 
 In jest and laugh to parry hateful ruth. 
 
 > The Three Ladies, suggested l)y the sublime sisterhood of Our 
 Ladles of Sorrow, in the •' Suspiria de Profundis " of De Quincey. 
 
78 To our Ladies of Death. 
 
 Over me pass the days and months and years 
 Like squadrons and battalions of the foe 
 
 Trampling with thoughtless thrusts and alien jeers 
 Over a wounded soldier lying low : 
 
 He grips his teeth, or flings them words of scorn 
 
 To mar their triumph ; but the while, outworn, 
 Inwardly craves for death to end his woe. 
 
 Thus I, in secret, call, O Death 1 to Thee. 
 
 Thou Youngest of the solemn Sisterhood, 
 Thou Gentlest of the mighty Sisters Three 
 
 Whom I have known so well since first endued 
 By Love and Grief with vision to discern 
 What spiritual life doth throb and burn 
 
 Through all our world, with evil powers and good. 
 
 The Three whom I have known so long, so well. 
 By intimate communion, face to face, 
 
 In every mood, of Earth, of Heaven, of Hell, 
 In every season and in every place. 
 
 That joy of Life has ceased^to visit me. 
 
 As one estranged by powerful witchery, 
 Infatuate in a Siren's weird embrace. 
 
 First Thou, O priestess, prophetess, and queen. 
 Our Lady of Beatitudes, first Thou : 
 
 Of mighty stature, of seraphic mien, 
 
 Upon the tablet of whose broad white brow 
 
 Unvanquishable Truth is written clear, 
 
 The secret of the mystery of our sphere, 
 The regnant word of the Eternal Now. 
 
To our Ladies of Death. 79 
 
 Thou standest garmented in purest white ; 
 
 But from thy shoulders wings of power half-spread 
 Invest thy form with such miraculous light 
 
 As dawn may clothe the earth with : and, instead 
 Of any jewel-kindled golden crown, 
 The glory of thy long hair flowing down 
 
 Is dazzling noonday sunshine round thy head. 
 
 Upon a sword thy left hand resteth calm, 
 
 A naked sword, two-edged and long and straight ; 
 
 A branch of olive with a branch of palm 
 Thy right hand proffereth to hostile Fate. 
 
 The shining plumes that clothe thy feet are bound 
 
 By knotted strings, as if to tread the ground 
 With weary steps when thou wouldst soar elate. 
 
 Twin heavens uplifted to the heavens, thine eyes 
 
 Are solemn with unutterable thought 
 And love and aspiration ; yet there lies 
 
 Within their light eternal sadness, wrought 
 By hope deferred and baffled tenderness : 
 Of all the souls whom thou dost love and bless, 
 
 How few revere and love thee as they ought ! 
 
 Thou leadest heroes from their warfare here 
 To nobler fields where grander crowns are won ; 
 
 Thou leadest sages from this twilight sphere 
 To cloudless heavens and an unsetting sun ; 
 
 Thou leadest saints into that purer air 
 
 Whose breath is spiritual life and prayer : 
 Yet, lo 1 they seek thee not, but fear and shun I 
 
To our Ladies of Death. 
 
 Thou takest to thy most maternal breast 
 
 Young children from the desert of this earth, 
 
 Ere sin hath stained their souls, or grief opprest. 
 And bearest them unto an heavenly birth. 
 
 To be the Vestals of God's Fane above : 
 
 And yet their- kindred moan against thy love, 
 With wild and selfish moans in bitter dearth. 
 
 Most holy Spirit, first Self-conqueror ; 
 
 Thou Victress over Time and Destiny 
 And Evil, in the all-deciding war 
 
 So fierce, so long, so dreadful ! — Would that me 
 Thou hadst upgathered in my life's pure morn I 
 Unworthy then, less worthy now, forlorn, 
 
 I dare not, Gracious Mother, call on Thee. 
 
 Next Thou, O sibyl, sorceress and queen, 
 
 Our Lady of Annihilation, Thou ! 
 Of mighty stature, of demoniac mien ; 
 
 Upon whose swarthy face and livid brow 
 Are graven deeply anguish, malice, scorn, 
 Strength ravaged by unrest, resolve forlorn 
 
 Of any hope, dazed pride that will not bow. 
 
 Thy form is clothed with wings of iron gloom ; 
 
 But round about thee, like a chain, is rolled. 
 Cramping the sway of every mighty plume, 
 
 A stark constringent serpent fold on fold : 
 Of its two heads, one sting is in thy brain, 
 The other in thy heart ; their venom-pain 
 
 Like fire distilling through thee uncontrolled. 
 
To our Ladies of Death. 8i 
 
 A rod of serpents wieldeth thy right hand ; 
 
 Thy left a cup of raging fire, whose light 
 Burns lurid on thyself as thou dost stand; 
 
 Thy lidless eyes tenebriously bright ; 
 Thy wings, thy vesture, thy dishevelled hair 
 Dark as the Grave; thou statue of Despair, 
 
 Thou Night essential radiating night. 
 
 Thus have I seen thee in thine actual form ; 
 
 Not thus can see thee those whom thou dost sway. 
 Inscrutable Enchantress ; young and warm, 
 
 Pard-beautiful and brilliant, ever gay ; 
 Thy cup the very Wine of Life, thy rod 
 The wand of more voluptuous spells than God 
 
 Can wield in Heaven; thus charmest thou thy prey. 
 
 The selfish, fatuous, proud, and pitiless, 
 
 All who have falsified life's royal trust ; 
 The strong whose strength hath basked in idleness, 
 
 The great heart given up to worldly lust. 
 The great mind destitute of moral faith ; 
 Thou scourgest down to Night and utter Death, 
 
 Or penal spheres of retribution just. 
 
 O mighty Spirit, fraudful and malign, 
 
 Demon of madness and perversity ! 
 The evil passions which may make me thine 
 
 Are not yet irrepressible in me ; 
 And I have pierced thy mask of riant youth, 
 And seen thy form in all its hideous truth : 
 
 I will not. Dreadful Mother, call on Thee. 
 
To our Ladies of Death. 
 
 Last Thou, retired nun and throneless queen, 
 
 Our Lady of Oblivion, last Thou : 
 Of human stature, of abstracted mien ; 
 
 Upon whose pallid face and drooping brow 
 Are shadowed melancholy dreams of Doom, 
 And deep absorption into silent gloom. 
 
 And weary bearing of the heavy Now. 
 
 Thou art all shrouded in a gauzy veil, 
 
 Sombrous and cloudlike ; all except that face 
 
 Of subtle loveliness though weirdly pale. 
 
 Thy soft, slow-gliding footsteps leave no trace. 
 
 And stir no sound. Thy drooping hands infold 
 
 Their frail white fingers ; and, unconscious, hold 
 A poppy-wreath, thine anodyne of grace. 
 
 Thy hair is like a twilight round thy head : 
 
 Thine eyes are shadowed wells, from Lethe-stream 
 
 With drowsy subterranean waters fed ; 
 Obscurely deep, without a stir or gleam ; 
 
 The gazer drinks in from them with his gaze 
 
 An opiate charm to curtain all his days, 
 A passive languor of oblivious dream. 
 
 Thou hauntest twilight regions, and the trance 
 Of moonless nights when stars are few and wan : 
 
 Within black woods ; or over the expanse 
 Of desert seas abysmal ; or upon 
 
 Old solitary shores whose populous graves 
 
 Are rocked in rest by ever-moaning waves ; 
 Or through vast ruined cities still and lone. 
 
 
lo our Ladies of Death. 83 
 
 The weak, the weary, and the desolate, 
 
 The poor, the mean, the outcast, the opprest, 
 
 All trodden down beneath the march of Fate, 
 Thou gatherest, loving Sister, to thy breast. 
 
 Soothing their pain and weariness asleep ; 
 
 Then in thy hidden Dreamland hushed and deep 
 Dost lay them, shrouded in eternal rest. 
 
 O sweetest Sister, and Sole Patron Saint 
 
 Of all the humble eremites who flee 
 From out life's crowded tumult, stunned and faint, 
 
 To seek a stem and lone tranquility 
 In Libyan wastes of time : my hopeless life 
 With famished yearning craveth rest from strife; 
 
 Therefore, thou Restful One, I call on Thee I 
 
 Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep ; 
 
 Down, down, far-hidden in thy duskiest cave ; 
 While all the clamorous years above me sweep 
 
 Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave 
 On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance, 
 A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance 
 
 The restful rapture of the inviolate grave. 
 
 Upgathered thus in thy divine embrace, 
 
 Upon mine eyes thy soft mesmeric hand, 
 While wreaths of opiate odour interlace 
 
 About my pulseless brow ; babe-pure and bland, 
 Passionless, senseless, thoughtless, let me dream 
 Some ever-slumbrous, never-varying theme. 
 
 Within the shadow of thy Timeless Land. 
 
84 To our Ladies of Death. 
 
 That when I thus have drunk my inmost fill 
 Of perfect peace, I may arise renewed ; 
 
 In soul and body, intellect and will, 
 
 Equal to cope with Life whate'er its mood ; 
 
 To sway its storm and energise its calm ; 
 
 Through rhythmic years evolving like a psalm 
 Of infinite love and faith and sanctitude. 
 
 But if this cannot be, no less I cry, 
 
 Come, lead me with thy terrorless control 
 
 Down to our Mother's bosom, there to die 
 By abdication of my separate sou! : 
 
 So shall this single, self -impelling piece 
 
 Of mechanism from lone labour cease. 
 Resolving into union with the Whole. 
 
 Our mother feedeth thus our little life. 
 
 That we in turn may feed her with our death : 
 
 The great Sea sways, one interwoven strife, 
 Wherefrom the Sun exhales a subtle breath, 
 
 To float the heavens sublime in form and hue. 
 
 Then turning cold and dark in order due 
 
 Rain weeping back to swell the Sea beneath. 
 
 One part of me shall feed a little worm, 
 And it a bird on which a man may feed ; 
 
 One lime the mould, one nourish insect-sperm ; 
 One thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed ; 
 
 This swell a fruit, and that evolve in air ; 
 
 Another'trickle to a springlet's lair, 
 Another paint a daisy on the mead : 
 
To our Ladies of Death. 85 
 
 With cosmic interchange of parts for all, 
 
 Through all the modes of being numberless 
 Of every element, as may befall. 
 
 And if earth's general soul hath consciousness. 
 Their new life must with strange new joy be thrilled. 
 Of perfect law all perfectly fulfilled ; 
 
 No sin, no fear, no fail'ure, no excess. 
 
 Weary of living isolated life, 
 
 Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain, 
 Weary of struggling in all-sterile strife. 
 
 Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain, 
 I close my eyes and hush my panting breath, 
 And yearn for Thee, divinely tranquil Death, 
 
 To come and soothe away my bitter pain. 
 
INSOMNIA. 
 
 ' Sleepless tdmselt to give to others sleep. 
 " He giveth His beloved sleep." 
 
 I heard the sounding of the midnight hour ; 
 The others one by one had left the room, 
 In calm assurance that the gracious power 
 
 Of Sleep's fine alchemy would bless the gloom, 
 Transmuting all its leaden weight to gold, 
 To treasures of rich virtues manifold, 
 
 New strength, new health, new life ; 
 Just weary enough to nestle softly, sweetly, 
 Into divine unconsciousness, completely 
 Delivered from the world of toil and care and strife. 
 
 Just weary enough to feel assured of rest, 
 
 Of Sleep's divine oblivion and repose, 
 Renewing heart and brain for richer zest, 
 
 Of waking life when golden morning glows. 
 As young and pure and glad as if the first 
 That ever on the void of darkness burst 
 
 With ravishing warmth and light ; 
 On dewy grass and flowers and blithe birds singing. 
 And shining waters, all enraptured springing, 
 Fragrance and siiiue and song, out of the womb of night. 
 
88 Insomnia. 
 
 But I with infinite weariness outworn, 
 
 Haggard with endless nights unblessed by sleep, 
 Ravaged by thoughts unutterably forlorn, 
 Plunged in despairs unfathomably deep. 
 Went cold and pale and trembling with affright 
 Into the desert vastitude of Night, 
 
 Arid and wild and black ; 
 Forebodmg no oasis of sweet slumber, 
 Counting beforehand all the countless number 
 Of sands that are its minutes on my desolate track. 
 
 And so I went, the last, to my drear bed, 
 
 Aghast as one who should go down to lie 
 Among the blissfully unconscious dead, 
 
 Assured that as the endless years flowed by 
 Over the dreadful silence and deep gloom 
 And dense oppression of the stifling tomb, 
 
 He only of them all. 
 Nerveless and impotent to madness, never 
 Could hope oblivion's perfect trance for ever : 
 An agony of life eternal in death's pall. 
 
 But that would be for ever, without cure ! — 
 And yet the agony be not more great ; 
 
 Supreme fatigue and pain, while they endure. 
 Into Eternity their time translate ; 
 
 Be it of hours and days or countless years. 
 
 And boundless asons, it alike appears 
 To the crushed victim's soul; 
 
 Utter despair foresees no termination, 
 
 But feels itself of infinite duration; 
 The smallest fragment instant comprehends the whole. 
 
Insomnia. 89 
 
 The absolute of torture as of bliss 
 
 Is timeless, each transcending time and space ; 
 The one an infinite obscure abyss, 
 
 The other an eternal Heaven of grace. — 
 Keeping a little lamp of glimmering light 
 Companion through the horror of the night. 
 
 I laid me down aghast 
 As he of all who pass death's quiet portal 
 Malignantly reserved alone immortal. 
 In consciousness of bale that must for ever last. 
 
 I laid me down and closed my heavy eyes, 
 
 As if sleep's mockery might win true sleep ; 1 
 
 And grew aware, with awe but not surprise. 
 
 Blindly aware through all the silence deep, 
 Of some dark Presence watching by my bed. 
 The awful image of a nameless dread ; 
 
 But I lay still fordone ; 
 And felt its Shadow on me dark and solemn 
 And steadfast as a monumental column, 
 And thought drear thoughts of Doom, and heard the bells chime One. 
 
 And then I raised my weary eyes and saw. 
 
 By some slant moonlight on the ceiling thrown 
 And faint lamp-gleam, that Image of my awe. 
 
 Still as a pillar of basaltic stone. 
 But all enveloped in a sombre shroud 
 Except the wan face drooping heavy-lrcowed, 
 
 With sad eyes fixed on mine ; 
 Sad weary yearning eyes, but fixed remorseless 
 Upon my eyes yet wearier, that were forceless 
 To bear the cruel pressure; cruel, unmalign. 
 
QC" Insomnia. 
 
 Wherefore I asked for what I knew too well : 
 O ominous midnight Presence, ^^^lat art Thou ? 
 
 Whereto in tones that sounded like a knell : 
 " I am the Second Hour, appointed now 
 
 To watch beside thy slumberless unrest ** 
 
 Then I : Thus both, unlike, alike unblest ; 
 For I should sleep, you fly : 
 
 Are not those wings beneath thy mantle moulded ? 
 
 O Hour ! unfold those wings so straitly folded, 
 And urge thy natural flight beneath the moonlit sky. 
 
 " My wings shall open when your eyes shall close 
 
 In real slumber from this waking drear ; 
 Your wild unrest is my enforced ref>ose ; 
 
 Ere I move hence you must not know me here." 
 Could not your wings fan slimiber through my brain, 
 Soothing away its weariness and pain ? 
 
 " Your sleep must stir my wings : 
 Sleep, and I bear you gently on my pinions 
 Athwart my span of hollow night's dominions. 
 Whence hour on hour shall bear to morning's golden springs. 
 
 That which I ask of you. you ask of me. 
 
 O weary Hour, thus standing sentinel 
 Against your nature, as I feel and see 
 
 Against my own your form immovable : 
 Could I bring Sleep to set you on the wing. 
 What other thing so gladly would I bring .' 
 
 Truly the Poet saith : 
 If that is best whose absence we deplore most. 
 Whose presence in our longings is the foremost, 
 What blessings equal Sleep save only love and death .* 
 
Insomnia. 91 
 
 I let my lids fall, sick of thought and sense. 
 
 But felt that Shadow heavy on my heart: 
 And saw the night before me an immense 
 
 Black waste of ridge-wails, hour by hour apart, 
 Di\-iding deep ra\-ines : from ridge to ridge 
 Sleep's flying hour was an aerial bridge ; 
 
 But I, whose hours stood fast. 
 Must climb down painfully each steep side hither, 
 And climb more painfully each steep side thither. 
 And so make one hour's span for years of tra^-ail last. 
 
 Thus I went down into that first ravine. 
 
 Wearily, slowly, blindly, and alone, 
 Staggering, stumbling, sinking depths unseen, 
 
 Shaken and bruised and gashed by stub and stone ; 
 And at the bottom paven with slipperiness, 
 A torrent-brook rushed headlong with such stress 
 
 Against my feeble limbs, 
 Such fury of wave and foam and icy bleakness 
 Buffetting insupportably my weakness 
 That when I -svould recall, dazed memory swirls and swims. 
 
 How I got through I know not. faint as death ; 
 
 And then I had to climb the awful scarp. 
 Creeping with many a pause for panting breath. 
 
 Clinging to tangled root and rock-jut sharp ; 
 Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat. 
 Trembling, and bleeding hands and knees and feet ; 
 
 Falling, to rise anew ; 
 Until, with lamentable toil and travel 
 Upon the ridge of arid sand and gravel 
 I lay supine half-dead and heard the bells chime Two: 
 
92 Insomnia. 
 
 And knew a change of Watchers in the room, 
 
 Without a stir or sound beside my bed ; 
 Only the tingling silence of the gloom, , 
 
 The muffled pulsing of the night's deep dread; 
 And felt an image mightier to appal, 
 And looked ; the moonlight on the bed-foot wall 
 
 And corniced ceiling white 
 Was slanting now ; and in the midst stood solemn 
 And hopeless as a black sepulchral column 
 A steadfast shrouded Form, the Third Hour of the night. 
 
 The fixed regard implacably austere, 
 Yet none the less ineffably forlorn. 
 Something transcending all my former fear 
 
 Came jarring through my shattered frame outworn : 
 I knew that crushing rock could not be stirred ; 
 I had no heart to say a single word. 
 
 But closed my eyes again ; 
 And set me shuddering to my task stupendous 
 Of climbing down and up that gulph tremendous 
 Unto the next hour-ridge beyond Hope's farthest ken. 
 
 Men sigh and plain and wail how life is brief : 
 
 Ah yes, our bright eternities of bliss 
 Are transient, rare, minute beyond belief, 
 
 Mere star-dust meteors in Time's night-abyss; 
 Ah no, our black eternities intense 
 Of bale are lasting, dominant, immense, 
 
 As Time which is their breath ; 
 The memory of the bliss is yearning sorrow. 
 The memory of the bale clouds every morrow 
 Darkening through nights and days unto the night of Death. 
 
Insomnia. 93 
 
 No human words could paint my travail sore 
 
 In the thick darkness of the next ravine. 
 Deeper immeasurably than that before ; 
 
 When hideous agonies, unheard, unseen, 
 In overwhelming floods of torture roll, 
 And horrors of great darkness drown the soul, 
 
 To be is not to be 
 In memory save as ghastliest impression, 
 
 And chaos of demoniacal possession 
 
 I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Three. 
 
 And like a pillar of essential gloom, 
 
 Most terrible in stature and regard. 
 Black in the moonlight filling all the room 
 
 The Image of the Fourth Hour, evil-starred, 
 Stood over me ; but there was Something more, 
 Something behind It undiscerned before, i 
 
 More dreadful than Its dread, 
 Which overshadowed it as with a fateful 
 Inexorable fascination hateful, — 
 A wan and formless Shade from regions of the dead. 
 
 I shut my eyes against that spectral Shade, 
 Which yet allured them with a deadly charm, 
 
 And that black Image of the Hour, dismayed 
 By such tremendous menacing of harm ; 
 
 And so into the gulph as into Hell ; 
 
 Where what immeasurable depths I fell. 
 With seizures of the heart 
 
 Whose each clutch seemed the end of all pulsation. 
 
 And tremors of exanimate prostration. 
 Are horrors in my soul that never can depart. 
 
94 Insomnia. 
 
 If I for hope or wish had any force, 
 
 It was that I might rush down sharply hurled 
 From rock to rock until a mangled corse 
 
 Down with the fury of the torrent whirled, 
 The fury of black waters and white foam, 
 To where the homeless find their only home. 
 
 In the immense void Sea, 
 Whose isles are worlds, surrounding, unsurrounded. 
 Whose depths no mortal plummet ever sounded, 
 Beneath all surface storm calm in Eternity. 
 
 Such hope or wish was as a feeble spark, 
 
 A little lamp's pale glimmer in a tomb. 
 
 To just reveal the hopeless deadly dark 
 
 And wordless horrors of my soul's fixed doom : 
 Yet some mysterious instinct obstinate. 
 Blindly unconscious as a law of Fate, 
 
 Still urged me on and bore 
 My shattered being through the unfeared peril 
 Of death less hateful than the life as sterile : 
 I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Four. 
 
 Tiie Image of that Fifth Hour of the night 
 Was blacker in the moonlight now aslant 
 
 Upon its left than on its shrouded right ; 
 And over and behind It, dominant, 
 
 The Shadow not Its shadow cast its spell, 
 
 Most vague and dim and wan and terrible. 
 Death's ghastly aureole. 
 
 Pregnant with overpowering fascination, 
 
 Commanding by repulsive instigation, 
 Despair's envenomed anodyne to tempt the Soul. 
 
Insomnia. 95 
 
 T closed my eyes, but could no longer keep 
 
 Under that Image and most awful Shade, 
 Supine in mockery of blissful sleep, 
 
 Delirious with such fierce thirst unallayed ; 
 Of all worst agonies the most unblest 
 Is passive agony of wild unrest : 
 Trembling and faint I rose, 
 And dressed witli painful efforts, and descended 
 With furtive footsteps and with breath suspended, 
 And left the slumbering house with my unslumbering woes. 
 
 Constrained to move through the unmoving hours, 
 Accurst from rest because the hours stood still; 
 
 Feeling the hands of the Infernal Powers 
 Heavy upon me for enormous ill, 
 
 Inscrutable intolerable pain, 
 
 Against which mortal pleas and prayers are vain, 
 Gaspings of dying breath, 
 
 And human struggles, dying spasms yet vainer: 
 
 Renounce defence when Doom is the Arraigner ; 
 Let impotence oi Life subside appeased in Death. 
 
 I paced the silent and deserted streets 
 
 In cold dark shade and chillier moonlight grey ; 
 
 Pondering a dolorous series of defeats 
 
 And black disasters from life's opening day. 
 
 Invested with the shadow of a doom 
 
 That filled the Spring and Summer with a gloom 
 Most wintry bleak and drear ; 
 
 Gloom from within as from a sulphurous censer 
 
 Making the glooms without for ever denser. 
 To blight the buds and flowers and fruitage of my year. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^^ 
 
 «MBMikfliM^Hi«»r« 
 
/ni,<mm,i 
 
 97 
 
 • II..W lit. in lliiiac liitlroiia Mdlcl.cdyoa clocjj 
 
 1 over couitt svtn tmck In ii|it)oi aailli, 
 UralulDtl lit h(Un«tll hlyllla til lilcaacd alcep 
 
 All. I hcjlihy wakliiji wlil> ilio new tlayV Idnlir'^ 
 ttuw tlo men cllmli back Irom t» owucm whoao strciM, 
 Cruahing lar deeper than all ctinaLlcniaiipaa, 
 
 la deep as deep dcBlh »ecni» ? 
 WIto can the aleps and atat^ca nietc and nuthb«r 
 Hy which wo rc-onicrKe liuin nii/iiily »lund»oi t — 
 Uui poor vast prtly lllr i» uiir (Uik inj^c nl ilicutna 
 
 Marfk, 1 88 a. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 BERTRAM DOBELL and J. M. WHEELER 
 LONDON 
 
Note. Previous to the friendship contracted by Mr. 
 Bertram Dobell with James Thomson, the chances 
 were that his poetry had remained for years unpublished, 
 in book form. Few and far between were readers who 
 knew of its buried existence in the unpopular- pages of 
 fiercely agnostic journals and reviews. 
 
 Mr. Dobell's cordial appreciation changed all that, and 
 to him more than to any other may be ascribed those 
 gleams of prosperity and hopes of help known to the poet 
 in his "lonesome latter years." 
 
 The present Bibliography, compiled with the assistance 
 
 of Mr. J. M. Wheeler, is therefore a fitting finale to 
 
 this long series of kindly acts and undiminished regard for 
 
 the fame of one who only desired to be known as " B. V." 
 
 "Ergo in perpetuum, /rater, ave atque vale / " 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY.- 
 
 1 
 
 SEPARATE WORKS. 
 
 The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm. 
 By B. V. Price twopence. Published at 13 
 Booksellers' Row, Strand, London, W. C. 
 Crown 8vo, pp. 16. 
 
 A Commission of Inquiry on Royalty, etc. 
 By B. V. Price twopence. Published at 13 
 Booksellers' Row, Strand, London, W. C. 
 Crown 8vo, pp. 16. 
 
 ( These pamphlets are not dated, but they were 
 both published in 1876). 
 
 The City of Dreadful Night and other 
 Poems. By James Thomson (B. V.). Lon- 
 don: 196 Strand. 1880. Crown 8 vo, half- 
 title, title, dedication and contents, 4 leaves 
 and pp. 184. 
 
 ( The edition '^of this work consisted of one 
 thousand ordinary copies, and forty on large 
 paper.) 
 
 Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonatn, 
 and Other Poems. By James Thomson, 
 author of "The City of Dreadful Night." 
 London: Reeves & Turner, 196 Strand. 1881. 
 Crown 8vo, pp. viii and 184. 
 
 {The edition of this work consisted of the 
 same number of copies as " The City of Dread- 
 ful Nights Nearly one-half of the edition was 
 destroyed by fire. ) 
 
02 Bibliography. 
 
 Essays and Phantasies. By James Thom- 
 son, author of " The City of Dreadful Night, 
 and Other Poems " ; " Vane's Story, Wed- 
 dah and Om-el- Bonain, and Other Poems." 
 London: Reeves & Turner, 196 Strand. 1881. 
 Crown 8vo, half-title, title and table of con- 
 tents, 3 leaves and pp. 320. 
 
 ( The edition of this work consisted of one 
 thousand copies. More than one-half of it was 
 destroyed by fire.) 
 
 Address on the Opening of the Newt Hall 
 OF THE Leicester Secular Society, Sun- 
 day, March 6, i88r, delivered by Mrs. Theo- 
 dore Wright. Written by James Thomson 
 (B. v.), author of "The City of Dreadful 
 Night" and "Vane's Story." Crown 8vo, 
 pp.8. 
 
 The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm, 
 and Other Pieces, in prose and rhyme, by 
 the late James Thomson (B. V.), with an In- 
 troduction by B. E., and " In our Forest of 
 the Past"; "Life's Hebe"; "L'Ancien Re- 
 gime " ; " Address on the Opening of the 
 Leicester Hall"; "Two Lovers," etc. Im- 
 printed by B. E. and W. L. S., Anno 1883. 
 Sold by Abel Heywood & Son, and by John 
 Heywood, Manchester and London. Square 
 24mo, pp. 98. 
 
 [Of this pamphlet some large paper copies 
 were issued., which contained a portrait of the 
 author and a facsimile of his handwriting.) 
 
Bibliography. 103 
 
 8 A Voice from the Nile and Other Poems. 
 By the late James Thomson (B. V.), author 
 of " The City of Dreadful Night," " Vane's 
 Story," and " Essays and Phantasies." With 
 a Memoir of the author, by Bertram Dobell. 
 London: Reeves & Turner, 196 Strand, 1884. 
 Crown 8vo, pp. xlix and 263, with a portrait. 
 
 [^The edition of this work consisted of one 
 thousand ordinary copies^ and forty on large 
 paper. More than one-half of the impression 
 was destroyed by fire.) 
 
 <9 Satires and Profanities. By James Thom- 
 son (B. v.), with a Preface by G. W. Foote. 
 London: Progressive Publishing Company, 
 28 Stonecutter Street, E. C, 1884. Crown 
 8vo, pp. viii and 191. 
 
 { The edition of this work consisted of three 
 thousand copies, but nearly the whole of it was 
 destroyed by fire.) 
 
 10 Shelley, a Porm, with other writings relat- 
 ing to Shelley, by the late James Thomson 
 (B. V.) ; to which is added an Essay on the 
 Poems of William Blake, by the same author. 
 Printed for private circulation, by Charles 
 Whittingham & Co., at the Chiswick Press, 
 1884. 8vo, boards, pp. xii and 128. 
 
 [Of this volume only one hundred and 
 ninety copies were printed, thirty of which are 
 on Whatman^ s handmade paper.) 
 
1 04 Bibliography. 
 
 \ The City of Dreadful Night, and Other 
 Poems. By James Thomson (B. V.), second 
 edition. London : Reeves & Turner, 196 
 Strand, and Bertram Dobell, Charing Cross 
 Road, 1888. Crown 8vo, 4 leaves and pp. 184. 
 
 ( The edition consiited of one thousand ordi- 
 nary copies and fifty on handmade paper. A 
 part of it was destroyed by fire.) 
 
 2 Selections from Original Contributions. 
 
 By James Thomson to Cope's Tobacco 
 Plant. Liverpool : At the office of " Cope's 
 Tobacco Plant," 1889. Price threepence. Be- 
 ing No. 3 of " Cope's Smoke-room Booklets," 
 with an "Introductory Notice " by Walter 
 Lewin. Crown 8vo, pp. 64. 
 
 3 The City of Dreadful Night. By James 
 
 Thomson, with Introduction by E. Cavazza. 
 Printed for Thomas B. Mosher, and published 
 by him at 37 Exchange Street, Portland, Me. 
 MDCCCXCII. 
 
 {Four hundred small paper copies on Van 
 Gelder's handmade paper (Post Svo), numbered 
 from 1 to 4-00 ; forty large paper copies on Van 
 Gelders handmade paper (Post i-to), numbered 
 from 1 to 40 ; ten large paper copies on Japan 
 vellum,^ numbered from 1 to 10, signed by 
 publisher.) 
 
Bibliography, 105 
 
 II 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS. 
 
 I. The London Investigator. 
 1858. 
 V. Mr. Save-His-Soul-Alive, OI (verse). By Bysshe 
 Vanolis, February. 
 Co^C. Notes on Emerson, December i. 
 
 1859. 
 
 ^ The King's Friend, February i. 
 
 ^^ . A Fe'.v Words about Burns, April i. 
 
 (It was in this magazine that Thomson 
 " first used the signature of B. V.,' by which he 
 was'afterward so well known to the readers of 
 the National Reformer. ' Bj'sshe Vanolis ' 
 was a nom-de-plume adopted out of reverence 
 for Shelley and Xovalis, Vanolis being an ana- 
 gram of the latter name." Salt's Life, p. 46.) 
 
 TI. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. 
 
 The Fadeless Bower,* July. 
 Four Stages in a Life,* October. 
 
 1859. 
 A Festival of Life,* April. 
 Tasso to Leonora,* May. 
 The Cypress and the Roses, June. 
 Withered Leaves, July. 
 The Jolly Veterans,* August. 
 A Capstan Chorus, August. 
 
 Bertram to the Most Noble and Beautiful Lady 
 Geraldine, November. 
 
io6 Bibliography. 
 
 To Arabella Goddard,* November. 
 The Happy Poet, December. 
 
 i860. 
 The Purple Flower of the Heather,* January. 
 A Winter's Night (poem), January. 
 The Lord of the Castle of Indolence,* March, 
 An Old Dream,* June. 
 
 ♦Contributions marked with an asterisk 
 are signed " Crepusculus." 
 
 ni. The National Reformer (London). 
 
 i860. 
 A Letter addressed to the Editor, on Shelley's Re- 
 ligious Opinions, August 26. 
 . Scrap Book Leaves, Nos. i and 2, Sept. i and 22. 
 ~ Shelley (an Essay, reprinted in Shelley, a poem, etc., 
 1884), December 22. 
 
 1861. 
 V The Dead Year (verse), January 6. 
 1862. 
 "^ The Established Church. Its real, as distinguished 
 from its apparent, strength, November 15. 
 Heresy (a sonnet), November 22. 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (verse), November 29. 
 The Mountain Voice (from Heine), December 6. 
 " The Life of Moses, by J. Lolsky (a review), Dec. 13. 
 ■ Songs from Heine (three short pieces), December 20. 
 The Greek Gods (from Heine), December 27. 
 
 1863. 
 ' The Meaning of History, by F. Harrison (a review). 
 
 January 3. 
 ^ To the Youngest of Our Ladies of Death, Feb. 28. 
 
Bibliography. 107 
 
 1864. 
 ~ Thomas Cooper's Argument for the Existence of 
 
 Deity (satirical verses), February 13. 
 'The Good God (from Beranger), July 11. 
 Poems and Songs, by J. M. Peacock (a review), 
 November 19. 
 
 1865. 
 The Athenasian Creed, January i. 
 - Body and Soul (from Heine), February 5. 
 "The Death of the Devil (from Beranger), March 26. 
 •^ The Almighty Devil (a letter in which he refers to 
 
 some lines in Vane's Story), July 30. 
 <■■' Mr. Kingsley's Convertites, September 24. 
 
 Rumble, Bumbledom, Bumbleism, October 29 and 
 
 November 5. 
 Per Contra : The Poet, High Art, Genius, Novem- 
 ber 12 and 19. 
 An Evening with Spenser, November 26. 
 Mr. Gladstone's Edinburgh Address, December 10. 
 \- Virtue and Vice (verse), December 17. 
 
 The Story of a Famous Old Firm, Dec. 24 and 31. 
 
 1866. 
 Christmas Eve in tb.e Upper Circles, January 7. 
 Poems of William Blake, January 14, 21, 28, and 
 February 4. 
 ' Four Scraps from Heine, February 11. 
 
 Open Secret Societies, Feb. 18, 25, and March 4. 
 Jesus: as God; as a Man, March 18. 
 , The Polish Insurgent (1863), A' Timely Prayer (epi- 
 gram), March 18. 
 Vane's Story, May 13, 27 ; June 3, 10. 
 Liberty and Necessity, May 20. 
 
 Goethe's Israel in the Wilderness, June 17, 24; 
 July I, 8. 
 
io8 Bibliography. 
 
 Who Killed Moses ? (verse) July 15. 
 
 Sunday at Hampstead, July 15, 22. 
 
 The One Thmg Needful, August 5. 
 
 Suggested from Southampton (epigram on Kingsley) , 
 
 September 2. 
 Sayings of Sigvat, September 30, October 14. 
 Polycrates (on Waterloo Bridge), October 14. 
 A Word for Xantippe, October 21. 
 Sympathy, Oct. 28, November 18 and 25. 
 Versicles (three epigrams), November 25. 
 The Swinburne Controversy, December 23. 
 
 1867. 
 
 Life's Hebe, January 13. 
 
 Philosophy, January 20. 
 
 The Saturday Re^dew on Mr. Bright's edition of Mr- 
 Bright, February 3. 
 
 Giordano Bruno, February 10, 24 ; March 3. 
 
 Art, February 17. 
 
 A Walk Abroad, April 21. 
 
 The Saturday Review and the National Reformer, 
 April 28 and May 5. 
 
 Heine on Kant, May 19. 
 
 Heine on Spinoza, May 26, June 2. 
 
 Heine on an liiustrioiis Exile with Something about 
 Whales, June 9, 16. 
 
 The Naked Goddess, June 23. 
 
 The Gift for Our Lord the King, July 7. 
 
 A Lady of Sorrow, July 14, 21, 28; August 4, 11, 
 18, 25; September i. 
 
 They Chanted, August i8. 
 
 Day. Night. (Two poems), August 25. 
 
 A Requiem, September i. 
 
 The Pan Anglican Synod (verse), October 13. 
 
 Copernicus : a Dialogue (from Leopardi), Nov. 3, 10. 
 
 t 
 
Bibliography. 109 
 
 ■ Europe's Rouge et Xoir (epigram), November 24. 
 Dialogue between a Natural Philosopher and a 
 Metaphysician (from Leopardi), December i. 
 Dialogue of Timander and pleander (from Leo- 
 pardi), December 8, 15. 
 Dialogue between Nature and the Soul (from Leo- 
 pardi), December 29. 
 
 1868. 
 
 Dialogue of Christopher Columbus and Peter Gu- 
 tierrez (from Leopardi), January 5. 
 
 Two Lovers, January 5. 
 
 Dialogue between Frederic Ruysch and his Mum- 
 mies (from Leopardi), January 26. 
 
 A German Village School (signed X), January 26. 
 
 Dialogue between Tristan and a Friend (from Leop- 
 ardi), February 9, 16. 
 
 Dialogues between a Vendor of Almanacs and a 
 Passer-by (from Leopardi), March 15. 
 
 In Praise of Birds (from Leopardi), March 22. 
 
 Dialogue of Plotinus and Poiphyry (from Leo- 
 pardi), April 5, 12. 
 
 Comparison of the Last Words of Brutus the 
 Younger, an* Theophrastus (from Leopardi), 
 May 3, 17. 
 
 Selection from the Thoughts of Leopardi, May 31 ; 
 June 7. 
 
 1869-70. 
 
 "The Pilgrim and the Shrine," and its Critics, 
 August 29, 1869. 
 
 Leopardi, October 3, 10, 17; November 7, 21,28; 
 December 12, 1869; January 2, 9, 16; Febru- 
 ary 6, 1870. 
 
no Bibliography. 
 
 1870. 
 
 Paul Louis Courier, July 31 ; August 7, 14. 
 
 Prometheus, July 31. 
 
 How the Bible Warns against Authorship, Aug. 2t. 
 
 Jottings, September 4. 
 
 How Heine Forewarned France, September 11. 
 
 Commission of Inquiry as to Complaints against 
 Royalty, September 18. 
 
 Paul Louis Courier on the Land Question, Oct. 9. 
 
 Paul Louis Courier on the Character of the People, 
 October 16. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, October 23, 30 ; No- 
 vember 6. 
 
 The Assassination of Paul Louis Courier, Oct. 30. 
 
 Our Visit to Aberdeen, November 6, 13. 
 
 Cowper's Task (New Version), November 13. 
 
 Hints for Freethought Novels, November 20. 
 
 A Bible Lesson on Monarchy, November 27. 
 
 Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, December 4. 
 
 Infidelity in the United States, December 11. 
 
 With the Christian World, December 18. 
 
 1871. 
 International Socialism in Spain, January i. 
 The Divan of Goethe, January 22. 
 Strange News for the Secularists, January 22. 
 Atheism in Spain, February 5. 
 Anastasius, February 12, 19. 
 
 Association for Intercessory Prayer, February 26. 
 Moxon's cheap edition of Shelley's Poems, Mar. 12. 
 In Exitu Israel (epigram), March 19. 
 Change for a Bad Napoleon (epigram), March 19. 
 Insults to the Church in Spain, April 2. 
 Poor Indeed (epigram), April 9. 
 
Bibliography. 1 1 1 
 
 The Successors who did not Succeed (two epigrams), 
 
 April i6. 
 Bless thee ! thou art translated (epigram), April 23. 
 Cross Lines from Goethe (epigram), April 23. 
 Another Spanish Atheistic Periodical, April 30. 
 We Croak (epigram). May 7. 
 In a Christian Churchyard (epigram). May 7. 
 Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and 
 
 Misery, August 27 ; September 3, 10, 17, 24 
 
 October 8, 22; November 5, 12. 
 
 1S71-72. 
 Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, November 19 ; Decem- 
 ber 3, 24, 1871; January 21, 28, 1872. 
 
 1872. 
 Our Congratulations on the Recovery of His Royal 
 
 Highness (Pathetic Epitaph), January 28. 
 A Song of Sighing, April 28. 
 In the Room, May 19. 
 Modem Miracles (signed "A Devotee "), October 27. 
 
 1873. 
 Religion in the Rocky Mountains, March 30 ; April 
 13- 
 
 (A tliird installment was promised in the 
 National Reformer \)wXviQVQr appeared; it was 
 printed, however, in Satires and Profanities, 
 1884.) 
 
 1874. 
 
 The City of Dreadful Night, March 22; April 12, 
 26; May 17. 
 
 Funeral of Mr. Austin Holyoake, April 26. 
 
 Jottings, July 5, 12, 19, 26; August 2, 16, 23, 30; Sep- 
 tember 6, 13, 20, 27 ; October 25 ; November 
 I, 8, 15, 22, 29; December 6, 13, 20. 
 
112 Bibliography. 
 
 A National Reformer in the Dog Days, July rz, 19. 
 Walt Whitman, July 26; August 2,9, 16, 23,30; 
 
 September 6. 
 Uhland in English, September 13, 20. 
 Bishop Alford on Professor Tyndall, September 27. 
 Extra-Experimental Beliefs, October 11. 
 Jesus Christ, our Great Exemplar, October 25. 
 The Daily News, November i. 
 John Stuart Mill on Religion, November 8, 15,32, 
 
 29; December 6, 13, 20, 27. 
 
 1875- 
 
 Henri Beyle (De Stendhal), January 31 ; February 
 7. M- 
 
 Jottings, January 31 ; February 7, 14, 21. 28; March 
 7, 14; April 4, 25; May 2. 
 
 Raffaele Sanzio, February 28. 
 
 Great Christ is Dead, March 14. 
 
 The Sankey Hymns, April 25. 
 
 Archbishop of Canterbury on Fallacies of Unbe- 
 lief, May 2. 
 
 Mr. Moody's Addresses, May 16. 
 
 A Popular Sermon, May 23. 
 
 Some May Meeting Figures, May 30. 
 
 Some May Meeting Speeches, June 6. 
 
 Debate between Mr. C. Watts and Mr. T. B. Wof- 
 fendale, June 13, 20. 
 
 1891. 
 Selections from the MS. Books of B. V.,- April 19, 
 26; May 3, 10, 17,24; June 7, 14; July 5, 12, 
 19; August 23, 30. 
 
Bibliography. 113 
 
 IV. The Secularist (London). 
 
 1876. 
 Secularism and the Bible, January i. 
 By the Sea, I. (verse), January i. 
 Reverberations (a review), January i. 
 By the Sea, II. (verse), January 8. 
 Whitman and Swinburne, January 8. 
 Heinrich Heine, January 8, 15, 22, 29 ; February 5, 12. 
 By the Sea, III. and IV. (verse), January 15. 
 By the Sea, V. (verse), January 22. 
 Where? (From Heine), January 29. 
 The Mountain Voice (From Heine), February 5. 
 The Pilgrimage to Kerlaar (From Heine), Feb. 12. 
 Arthur Schopenhauer (a review), February 19, 26 ; 
 
 March 11. 
 From Heine (poems), February 19,26; March 4, 11. 
 The Devil in the Church of England, February 26. 
 
 March 4. 
 Ccirlist Reminiscences, March 11, 18, 25; April i. 
 Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other 
 
 Poems, by Christma G. Rossetti (a review), 
 
 March 25. 
 A Great Modern Astrologer, April i. 
 A Recusant (the sonnet called " Heresy," already 
 
 mentioned), April i. 
 To a Pianiste (a reprint of the verses in " Tail," " To 
 
 Arabella Goddard "), April 8. 
 Dr. Kenealy in a New Character, April 8. 
 The Secular Song and Hymn Book, edited by Annie 
 
 Besant (a review), April 8. 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold on the Church of England, 
 
 April 8. 
 Renan's Memories of his Childhood, April 15. 
 Religion in Japan, April 22. 
 
114 Bibliography. 
 
 Correspondence (a letter on Mr. Bradlaugh's notice 
 of the review of Mrs. Besant's Hymn Book), 
 April 22. 
 
 From Heine (three poems), April 29. 
 
 " The Bugbears of Infidelity " at Perth, May 6. 
 
 Among the Christians, May 6. 
 
 On the Worth of Metaphysical Systems, May 13. 
 
 From Heine (two poems). May 13. 
 
 Correspondence (Mr. G. J. Holyoake on Party Uni- 
 ty), May 13. 
 
 The Burial Question in the House of Lords, May 20. 
 
 Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, May 20. 
 
 The Life of Jonathan Swift, by John Foster, May 20. 
 
 The Standard o-cs. the Whigs and the Church, May 27. 
 
 The Three that Shall Be One, June 3. 
 
 Beauchamp's Career (a review), June 3. 
 
 A Few Words on the System of Spinoza, June 10. 
 
 The Leeds Conferences, June 17. 
 
 From Heine (a poem), June 24. 
 
 William Godwin : his Friends and Contemporaries, 
 by C. Kegan Paul (a review), June 24; July 
 I and 8. 
 
 Seen Thrice: a London Study, July 8 and 15. 
 
 The Bishop of London's Fund, July 15. 
 
 Mr. Foote at the Loudon Hall of Science, July 15. 
 
 Christian Evidences, Popular and Critical, July 22,29. 
 
 Indolence : a Moral Essay, July 22, 29 ; August 5. 
 
 The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, Aug. 5. 
 
 From Heine (Questions), August 5. 
 
 Some Muslim Laws and Beliefs, August 12, 19. 
 
 Shameless, Kew Gardens, 1865 (verse), August 12. 
 
 Sayings of Sigvat, August 19. 
 
 Low Life (verse), August 19. 
 
 Stray Thoughts, August 26. 
 
 Among the Christians, August 26. 
 
Bibliography. 115 
 
 The Christian Wi>rld and the Secularist again, Sep- 
 tember 9. 
 
 Pacchiarotto, by Rol^eit Browning (a review), 
 September 9. 
 
 The Loreley (after Heine), September 9. 
 
 Conversions Sudden and Gradual, September 16. 
 
 The Easter Questions, September 16. 
 
 Correspondence: September "Mr. G. J. Holyoake's 
 Libels," September 16. 
 
 On the Duty of Converts to Freethought, Sept. 23. 
 
 The London School Board Elections, September 30. 
 
 The Cornhill Magazine on Leopardi, September 30. 
 
 From Heine (a poem), September 30. 
 
 La Tentation de Saint Antoine par Gustave Flau- 
 bert (a review), September 30; October 7, 21, 
 28 ; November 4. 
 
 The Primate on the Church and the World, Oct. 7. 
 
 The Daily Neivs on Materialism, October 7. 
 
 From Heine (poems), October 14; November 4. 
 
 Spiritism in the Police Court, November u. 
 
 The Huddersfield Prosecution of a " Medium," No- 
 vember 18. 
 
 The London School Board Elections, December 9. 
 
 An Inspired Critic on Shelley, December 9. 
 
 Note of an English Republican on the Muscovite 
 Crusade, by A. C. Swinburne (a review), De- 
 cember 30. 
 
 1877. 
 
 Our Obstructions, January 6. 
 
 Among the Christians, January 6. 
 
 The Works of Francis Rabelais (a review), Jan. 6. 
 
 In Our Forest of the Past, February 17. 
 
 Song," The Nightingale was not yet Heard," Feb. 17. 
 
 Principal Tulloch on Personal Immortality, Feb. 24. 
 
1 1 6 Bibliography . 
 
 Prof. Martineau and the Rev. H. H. Dobney on 
 
 Prayer, March 3. 
 The Bi-centenary of Spinoza, M. Renan's Address, 
 
 March 10. 
 The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by G. Long 
 
 (a review), April 14, 21 ; May 5, 12. 
 Secular Review and Secularist. 
 Trois Contes, par Gustave Flaubert (a review), July 
 
 21, 1877. 
 
 V. Cope's Tobacco Plant (Liverpool). 
 
 For a full account of Thomson's connection 
 with this journal see SalVs Life, pp. 129-133; 
 138-151; 167-174; 259. A complete set of the 
 Tobacco Plant, 130 numbers, begins March, 1870, 
 and ends January, 1881, and is now extremely 
 scarce. Besides the articles named in our list 
 Thomson also did a considerable amount of 
 book reviewing for the Plant, more particu- 
 larly the Smoke-room Table notices of " Eng- 
 lish Men of Letters." He also contributed 
 " the last two or thi-ee mixtures, former mixer 
 having lately died." 
 
 1 Stray Whiffs from an Old Smoker, Sept., 1875. 
 
 2 Charles Baudelaire on Hasheesh, October, 1875. 
 
 3 Theophile Gautier as Hasheesh-Eater, Nov., 187 5. 
 
 4 A French Novel: Un Homme Serieux, by 
 
 Charles de Bernard, December, 1875. 
 
 5 The Fair of St. Sylvester, January, 1876. 
 
 6 Saint Amant. Three articles, February, March, 
 
 April, 1876. 
 
 7 Rabelais. Four articles, June, July, August, 
 
 October, 1876. 
 
Bibliography. \ 1 7 
 
 8 Ben Jonson. Fourteen articles, November, De- 
 
 cember, 1876; January, February, March, 
 May, June, August, September, October, 
 November, December, 1877 ; January, March. 
 1878. 
 
 9 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, March, 1877. 
 
 10 "You Love Tobacco Better," January, 1878. 
 
 u John Wilson and the Noctes Ambrosianae. 
 Two articles, April, 1878, and May, 1879. 
 
 12 Tobacco Smuggling in the Last Generation. 
 
 Seven articles, May, June, July, August, Sep- 
 tember, October, November, 1878. 
 
 13 The Tobacco Duties. Three articles, Decem- 
 
 ber, 1878; January, March. 1879. 
 
 14 " Social Notes " on Tobacco, January, 1879. 
 
 15 Tobacco at the Opera, February, 1879. 
 
 16 Tobacco Legislation in the Three Kingdoms. 
 
 Thirteen articles, March, .\pril, September, 
 November, December, 1879; January, March, 
 April, May, June, August, September, No- 
 vember, 1880. 
 
 17 An Old New Book (The Ordeal of Richard 
 
 Feverel, — a memorable critique). May, 1879. 
 
 18 James Hogg,,^ the Ettrick Shepherd. Three 
 
 articles, August, September, October, 1879. 
 
 19 George Meredith's New Work (The Egoist), 
 
 January, 1880. 
 
 20 Walt Whitman. Five articles, May, June, 
 
 August, September, December, 1880. 
 
 This was never completed, owing to the 
 discontinuance of the Plant; but two other arti- 
 cles were written, which are still in MS. 
 
1 8 Bibliography. 
 
 A Sergeant's Mess Song, November, 1880. 
 
 In additiou to these he contributed to a 
 Christmas publication issued in connection 
 with the PUmt in 1878, called " The Plenipotent 
 Key to Cope's Correct Card of the Peerless Pil- 
 grimage to Saint Nicotine of the Holy Herb," 
 " The Pilgrimage to Saint Nicotine," in verse; 
 and (probably) the introductory " Prologue " 
 in prose. 
 
 VI. The Liberal (London). 
 1879. 
 
 In the Valley of Humiliation, January. 
 
 Two Leaves of a Fadeless Rose of Love (Two ex- 
 cerpts from a still unpublished poem called 
 " Ronald and Helen "), January. 
 
 Professor Huxley on Hume, March. 
 
 Translations from Heine (two poems). May. 
 
 Meeting Again, June. 
 
 The Lover's Return (two more excerpts from " Ron- 
 ald and Helen "), July. 
 
 The Purple Flower of the Heather (reprinted from 
 Tait), August. 
 
 A Strange Book (four articles on Dr. J. J. Garth 
 Wilkinson's Improvisations from the Spirit), 
 September, October, November, December. 
 
 The Cypress and the Roses (reprinted from Tait), 
 October. 
 
 VII. Progress (London). 
 1884. 
 Bill Jones on Prayer, August. 
 
 A Real Vision of Sin (poem, written in 1859), Nov. 
 A Graveyard (epigram), December. 
 
Bibliography. 119 
 
 Supplement to the Inferno, February. 
 1886. 
 
 Siren's Song, March. 
 
 A Song of Sighing, April. 
 
 1887. 
 Sarpalus of Mardon, February, March, April, May, 
 June. 
 
 This Magazine contains many reprints 
 from the Secularist, etc., which it has not been 
 thouj?lit necessary to specify. 
 
 VIII. Various Magazines and Periodicals. 
 
 1 Daily Telegraph (London) : 
 
 " Middle Class Education," July 19, 1864. 
 
 In 1864 he had written two or three articles 
 for the Daily Telegraph. Salt's Life, p. 89. 
 
 2 Frazer's Magazine: 
 
 Sunday up the River, October, 1869. 
 
 3 National Secular Society's Almanac : 
 
 Notes on Religious Matters, 1872. 
 Some Anecdotes of Rabelais, 1876. 
 
 4 New York World : 
 
 (Three letters in August, 1873, wei-e contrib- 
 uted by Thomson, from Spain, where he Imd 
 been sent as a special correspondent to report 
 the movements of the Carlists. Salt's Life, pp. 
 98-102.) 
 
20 Bibliography. 
 
 5 Fortnightly Review: 
 
 The Deliverer, November, 1881 (written in 
 
 i8S9)> 
 A Voice from the Nile, July, 1882. 
 Proem, February, 1892 (written in 1882). 
 
 6 Athen^um : 
 
 Notes on the Structure of Shelley's Prome- 
 theus Unbound, September 17, 24; Octo- 
 ber 8; November 5, 19, 1881. 
 
 7 Gentleman's Magazine: 
 
 "The Ring and the Book," December, 1881. 
 
 8 Weekly Despatch : 
 
 Law V. Gospel, March 26. 
 
 The Old Story and the New Storey, April 2. 
 
 The Closure, April 30. 
 
 Despotism tempered by Dynamite, June 4. 
 
 Browning Society's Transactions, Part I, 
 1882: 
 Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning, 
 
Bibliography. 1 2 1 
 
 III 
 
 CRITICISM AND BIOGRAPHY. 
 I. Books and Pamphlets. 
 
 1 Amy Levy's "A Minor Poet," 1884. 
 
 (Tliomson is the subject of the leading 
 poem.) 
 
 2 The English Poets. Edited by T. H. Ward, ^y 
 
 ■ 1885. 
 
 (Notice of Thomson, b}' Philip Bourke 
 Marston.and excerpts from the "The City of 
 Dreadful Night," Vol. IV., pp. 621-628.) 
 
 3 A Nirvana Trilogy ; Three Essays on the 
 
 Career and the Literary Labors of James 
 Thomson. By William Maccall. Crown 
 Svo., pp. 32, n.d. [1886]. 
 
 4 Stedman's Victorian Poets. Latest edition. 
 
 5 Encvclop.^dia Britannica. Ninth edition. 
 
 (Notice of Thomson, by William Sharp, 
 1888.) 
 
 6 Literary Sketches. By H. S. Salt, 1888. 
 
 (Contains a reprint of the article previously 
 published in the Gentleman's Magazine.) 
 
 7 The Life of James Thomson (B. V.), with a 
 
 selection from his Letters, and a Study of his ^ 
 Writings. By H. S. Salt, author of " Liter- 
 ary Sketches," etc. London: Reeves & 
 
 J 
 
1 2 2 Bibliography. 
 
 Turner, 196 Strand, and Bertram Dobell, 
 Charing Cross Road. 1889. 8vo., pp. vii 
 and 335, with a portrait. 
 
 (^One thousand copies of this book were 
 printed^ but six hundred of them were destroyed 
 by fire.) 
 
 8 Roses and Rue. By W. Stewart Ross, 1890. 
 
 (Containing the author's recollections of 
 Thomson.) 
 
 9 The Poets and Poetry of the Century. 
 
 Edited by A. H. Miles, i -if^z. Vol. V. 
 
 II. Articles in Magazines and Periodicals: 
 
 1 Note on " The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 Academy, June 6, 1874. 
 
 2 A Necessitarian Poet, Spectator. June 20, 
 
 1874. 
 
 3 Review of "The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 Athenceum, May i, 1880. 
 
 4 Review of " The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 Academy, June 12, 1880. 
 
 5 A New Poet. By G. A. Simcox. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, July, 1880. 
 
 6 Review of "The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 London Quarterly Review, April, 1881. 
 
 7 The City of Dreadful Night and Other 
 
 Poems. By Philip Bourke Marston. Modern 
 Thought, May, 1881. 
 
 8 A New English Poet. By Joel Benton. Ap- 
 
 pleton's Journal, May, 1881. 
 
 9 Obituary Notice of Thomson. By Philip 
 
 Bourke Marston, Athenceum, June 10, 1882. 
 
Bibliography. 123 
 
 10 James Thomson : a Study. By G. G. Flaws, 
 
 Secular Review, June 24 and July I, 1882. 
 
 11 A Poet of To-day. (James Thomson.) To- 
 
 day, July, 1883. 
 
 12 James Thomson. — I. The Man. II. The Poet. 
 
 By G. W. Foote. Progress, April and June, 
 1884. 
 
 13 A Great Poet's Prose. By S. Briton. 
 
 Progress, December, 1884. 
 
 14 The Works OF James Thomson (B. v.). By 
 
 • H. S. Salt. Gentleman's Magazine. June, 1886. 
 (Reprinted in Salt's ''Literary Sketches," 1888.) 
 
 15 James Thomson. By Arthur C. Hillier. Dub- 
 
 lin University Review, December, 1885. 
 
 16 Childish Recollections of James Thom- 
 
 son (B. v.). By Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner. 
 Our Corner, August, 1886. 
 
 17 Letters of James Thomson. By Hypatia 
 
 Bradlaugh Bonner. Our Corner, Sept., 1886. 
 iS Why James Thomson did not Kill Him- 
 spLF. Spectator, March 23, '.889. 
 
 19 Some Extracts from James Thomson's 
 
 Note-Books. By H. S. Salt. Scottish Art 
 Review, Aijgust, 1889. 
 
 20 Reviews of Salt's "Life of James Thom- 
 
 son." AthencEum, March 16; Academy, 
 April 13; Agnostic Journal, April 6; Satur- 
 day Review, May 18; National Reformer (no- 
 tice written by G. W. Foote), March 31, Apr. 
 7, 14, 21 ; The Freethinker (notice written by 
 J. M. Wheeler), February 10; Watts' Literary 
 Guide (notice written by T. R. Wright), April 
 15, May 15, 1S89. 
 
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