A Mood.

Bowed hearts that hold the saddest memories     Are the most beautiful; and such make sweet     Light happy moods of alien natures which     Their sadness contacts, and so sanctifies.     And such to me is an old, gabled house,     Deserted and neglected and unknown     Within the dreamy hollow of its hills,     Dark, cedared hills and fruitless orchards sear;     With but its host of shrouded memories     Haunting its low and desolate rooms and halls,     Its roomy hearths and cob-webbed crevices.     Here in dim rainy noons I love to sit,     And hear the running rain along the roof,     The creak and crack of noises that are born     Of unseen and mysterious agencies;     The dripping footfalls of the wind adown     Lone winding stairways massy-banistered;     A clapping door and then a sudden hush     That brings a pleasant terror stiffening through     The tingling veins and staring from the eyes.     Then comes the running rain along the roof's     Rain-rotten gables and on rain-stained walls     Invokes vague images and memories     Of all its sometime lords and mistresses,     Until the stale material will assume     All that's clairvoyant, and the fine-strung ear     In quaint far rooms or dusty corridors     Hear wrinkled ladies all beruffled trail     Long haughty silks "miraculously stiff."