Poems (Holley)/The Haunted Castle
THE HAUNTED CASTLE.
It stands alone on a haunted shore,With curious words of deathless lore On its massive gate impearled;And its carefully guarded mystic keyLocks in its silent mystery From the seeking eyes of the world.
Oft do its stately walls repeatEchoes of music wildly sweet Swelling to gladness high—With mournful ballads of ancient time,And funeral hymns—and a nursery rhyme Dying away in a sigh.
Pictures out of each haunted room,Up through the ghostly shadows loom, And gleam with a spectral light;Pictures lit with a radiant glow,And some that image such desolate woe That, weeping, you turn from the sight.
Shining like stars in the twilight gloomBrows as white as a lily's bloom Gleam from its lattice and door;And voices soft as a seraph's note,Through its mysterious chambers float Back from eternity's shore.
In the mournful silence of midnight airYou hear on its stately and winding stair The echoes of fairy feet.Gentle footsteps that lightly fallThrough the enchanted castle hall, And up in the golden street.
And still in a dark forsaken tower,Crowned with a withered cypress flower, Is a bowed head turned away;A face like carvéd marble white,Sweet eyes drooping away from the light, Shunning the eye of day.
And oft when the light burns low and dimA haggard form ungainly and grim Unbidden enters the door;With chiding eyes whose burning lightYou fain would bury in darkness and night, Never to meet you more,
Mysteries strange its still walls keep,Strange are the forms that through it sweep— Walking by night and by day.But evermore will the castle hallEcho their footsteps' phantom fall, Till its walls shall crumble away.