III.
Another Cycle ends; at midnight ends,
To-night! and trembling thousands wait to die.
Their agonizing fear together blends
The strange portents of earth and air and sky,
With mystic words of ancient prophecy,
That told the terrors of this dolorous night:
When star by star should vanish from on high;
And prayer, and vow, and sacrificial rite
Should fail to save one beam from all the realms of light.
IV.
When thro’ the awful gloom the voice of man,
Feebler and feebler heard, should pass away:
And living forms faint, helpless, groping, wan,
To loathsome reptiles fall an easy prey;
Till Death, relentless still, should end his sway,
His victory o’er—his sable banner furled—
And leave to dismal stream, and surging sea,
And crumbling rocks, down the dark valleys hurled,
To sound their echoing dirge, and mourn a lifeless world.
V.
In artless rhyme I thought, forsooth, to tell
Only of one who durst with boldness stand,
That fearful night, and all that him befell.
For when their warrior host and priestly band
I called, to bare their breasts at my command,
And claimed their monarch’s voice to fill my song,
They spurned my feeble spell and borrowed wand;
Yet words and sighs that to deep woe belong
The naming of that night wrung from the flitting throng.
