Page:Livingstone in Africa.djvu/58

Nevermore! wails the burden of the strain,
Burdening, as it seems, the very sleep
Of a serene, fair incense-breathing earth!
Ever it wails, low, dreary, and desolate,
Oppress'd and muffled in a solemn sorrow;
A dirge world-weary, an old-world requiem,
Trailing a slow wan length along the dust,
Faint from the fount of immemorial tears;
A shadow, whose maim'd wings are plumed with awe;
Sunken so deep from ghostly woes and fears,
And broken hearts of all ancestral lives;
Phantoms aroused by a fresh living pain
To haunt the labyrinths of a living soul,
And all the dark slow movement of the dirge!

One cabin stands a little way apart
From all the rest upon a higher ground.
Hence flows the wail! A man laments his son.
It is an aged warrior of the tribe,
Who cowers, and sways himself upon the floor,
Before an ember glow, that he beholds