The City

Written 1919

   It was golden and splendid,

     That City of light;

   A vision suspended

     In deeps of the night;

   A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.

   I remember the season

     It dawn'd on my gaze;

   The mad time of unreason,

     The brain-numbing days

   When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.

   More lovely than Zion

     It shone in the sky

   When the beams of Orion

     Beclouded my eye,

   Bringing sleep that was filled with dim mem'ries of moments obscure and gone by.

   Its mansions were stately,

     With carvings made fair,

   Each rising sedately

     On terraces rare,

   And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming there.

   The avenues lur'd me

     With vistas sublime;

   Tall arches assur'd me

     That once on a time

   I had wander'd in rapture beneath them, and bask'd in the Halcyon clime.

   On the plazas were standing

     A sculptur'd array;

   Long bearded, commanding,

     rave men in their day--

   But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face battered away.

   In that city effulgent

     No mortal I saw,

   But my fancy, indulgent

     To memory's law,

   Linger'd long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.

   I fann'd the faint ember

     That glow'd in my mind,

   And strove to remember

     The aeons behind;

   To rove thro' infinity freely, and visit the past unconfin'd.

   Then the horrible warning

     Upon my soul sped

   Like the ominous morning

     That rises in red,

   And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.