The Passing Show

I know not if it was a dream. I viewedA city where the restless multitude,Between the eastern and the western deepHad roared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude.

Colossal palaces crowned every height;Towers from valleys climbed into the light;O'er dwellings at their feet, great golden domesHung in the blue, barbarically bright.

But now, new-glimmering to-east, the dayTouched the black masses with a grace of gray,Dim spires of temples to the nation's GodStudding high spaces of the wide survey.

Well did the roofs their solemn secret keepOf life and death stayed by the truce of sleep,Yet whispered of an hour-when sleepers wake,The fool to hope afresh, the wise to weep.

The gardens greened upon the builded hillsAbove the tethered thunders of the millsWith sleeping wheels unstirred to service yetBy the tamed torrents and the quickened rills.

A hewn acclivity, reprieved a space,Looked on the builder's blocks about his baseAnd bared his wounded breast in sign to say:"Strike! 't is my destiny to lodge your race.

"'T was but a breath ago the mammoth browsedUpon my slopes, and in my caves I housedYour shaggy fathers in their nakedness,While on their foeman's offal they caroused."

Ships from afar afforested the bay.Within their huge and chambered bodies layThe wealth of continents; and merrily sailedThe hardy argosies to far Cathay.

Beside the city of the living spread--Strange fellowship!--the city of the dead;And much I wondered what its humble folk,To see how bravely they were housed, had said.

Noting how firm their habitations stood,Broad-based and free of perishable wood--How deep in granite and how high in brassThe names were wrought of eminent and good,

I said: "When gold or power is their aim,The smile of beauty or the wage of shame,Men dwell in cities; to this place they fareWhen they would conquer an abiding fame."

From the red East the sun--a solemn rite--Crowned with a flame the cross upon a heightAbove the dead; and then with all his strengthStruck the great city all aroar with light!

I know not if it was a dream. I cameUnto a land where something seemed the sameThat I had known as 't were but yesterday,But what it was I could not rightly name.

It was a strange and melancholy land.Silent and desolate. On either handLay waters of a sea that seemed as dead,And dead above it seemed the hills to stand,

Grayed all with age, those lonely hills--ah me,How worn and weary they appeared to be!Between their feet long dusty fissures cloveThe plain in aimless windings to the sea.

One hill there was which, parted from the rest,Stood where the eastern water curved a-west.Silent and passionless it stood. I thoughtI saw a scar upon its giant breast.

The sun with sullen and portentous gleamHung like a menace on the sea's extreme;Nor the dead waters, nor the far, bleak barsOf cloud were conscious of his failing beam.

It was a dismal and a dreadful sight,That desert in its cold, uncanny light;No soul but I alone to mark the fearAnd imminence of everlasting night!

All presages and prophecies of doomGlimmered and babbled in the ghastly gloom,And in the midst of that accursèd sceneA wolf sat howling on a broken tomb.