THE VALLEY OF SHADOW.
Reading edition
———
BY HENRY B. HIRST.
———
When daylight ends, where night begins,
(May Jesus save us from our sins!)
There lies a narrow, shadowy vale —
(Mark me, I but repeat a tale
Which once, I know not how, or when,
Came mystically within my ken:)
A dark, sepulchral, silent vale,
Lying beyond the ultimate pale
Of distant Time—beyond the din
Of human tongues—by which the Djin,
And Ghoul, and Afreet, hating light,
Come in the noiselessness of night
To chant unearthly notes and bars
To the unquiet, pensive stars —
To carol many a carping tune
In mockery of the mourning moon —
By which the jackal and the lynx
Make curious queries to the Sphynx,
Who never drops her stony eyes
From contemplation of the skies
To heed the rout, whose awful howls
Alarm the fiery-visioned owls,
That, at the decadence of day,
Flit round and round in search of prey.
Without a stream, without a tree,
The vale has been and still will be —
Though obelisks with many a trace
Of many an immemorial race,
With many a mighty pyramid
In which lost histories lie hid,
Rudely engraved on silent stone,
For countless centuries unknown,
Point, here, and there, and yon, to where
God and his angels dwell in air; —
And thistles rise and grow and bloom,
And cypresses, those trees of gloom,
Frown everywhere along the pale
Which is the entrance to the vale; —
But nothing—nothing moves within:
There is no tumult and no din: —
Shut out by hills that scarcely show
A rift of sky to those below,
The dwellers in this lonely spot
Rest even by memory forgot: —
Recumbent, in a sunless rest
They lie, with hands across their breast,
So motionless of hand or head
That he who gazed would deem them dead,
Or sleeping, when their toil was done,
Until the rising of the sun.
They have no mind, thus left alone;
Strike them; you will not hear a groan;
An icy torpor fills their veins;
They have no mortal cares, or pains,
Or sense, as we have; theirs is life,
If sleep be life, with nothing rife
Which we who love the setting sun
And crimson sky and crystal run,
And all things else that God has made —
We, who would moulder in the shade,
Can contemplate or understand
Like these inhabitants of the land,
These rigid and insensible blocks
Of clay, as cold of heart as rocks:
Still, so the legend sings, whose tune
Dropped, dew-like, from the tearful moon,
When sky and earth shall pass away,
When space becomes eternal day
The Dwellers of the Vale will rise
Beyond what once have been the skies,
Radiant, before immortal eyes,
To live and love in Paradise!
THE GAME OF DRAUGHTS. Engraved expressly for Graham’s Magazine.
