FullReads

Not merely with the mimic life that lies
Within the compass of Art’s simulation;
Their souls were looking thro’ their painted eyes
With awful speculation.

On ev’ry lip a speechless horror dwelt;
On ev’ry brow the burthen of affliction;
The old Ancestral Spirits knew and felt
The House’s malediction.

Such earnest woe their features overcast,
They might have stirr’d, or sigh’d, or wept, or spoken;
But, save the hollow moaning of the blast,
The stillness was unbroken.

No other sound or stir of life was there,
Except my steps in solitary clamber,
From flight to flight, from humid stair to stair,
From chamber into chamber.

Deserted rooms of luxury and state,
That old magnificence had richly furnish’d
With pictures, cabinets of ancient date,
And carvings gilt and burnish’d.

Rich hangings, storied by the needle’s art
With scripture history, or classic fable;
But all had faded, save one ragged part,
Where Cain was slaying Abel.

The silent waste of mildew and the moth
Had marr’d the tissue with a partial ravage;
But undecaying frown’d upon the cloth
Each feature stern and savage.

The sky was pale; the cloud a thing of doubt;
Some hues were fresh, and some decay’d and duller;
But still the BLOODY HAND shone strangely out
With vehemence of color!

The BLOODY HAND that with a lurid stain
Shone on the dusty floor, a dismal token,
Projected from the casement’s painted pane,
Where all beside was broken.

The BLOODY HAND significant of crime,
That glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its crimson unimpair’d by time,
In such a wondrous manner!

O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!

The Death Watch tick’d behind the panel’d oak,
Inexplicable tremors shook the arras,
And echoes strange and mystical awoke,
The fancy to embarrass.

Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,
But thro’ one gloomy entrance pointing mostly,
The while some secret inspiration said,
That Chamber is the Ghostly!

Across the door no gossamer festoon
Swung pendulous–no web–no dusty fringes,
No silky chrysalis or white cocoon
About its nooks and hinges.

The spider shunn’d the interdicted room,
The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banish’d,
And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom
The very midge had vanish’d.

One lonely ray that glanced upon a Bed,
As if with awful aim direct and certain
To show the BLOODY HAND in burning red
Embroider’d on the curtain.

And yet no gory stain was on the quilt–
The pillow in its place had slowly rotted;
The floor alone retain’d the trace of guilt,
Those boards obscurely spotted.

Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence
With mazy doubles to the grated casement–
Oh what a tale they told of fear intense,
Of horror and amazement!

What human creature in the dead of night
Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance?
Had sought the door, the window in his flight,
Striving for dear existence?

What shrieking Spirit in that bloody room
Its mortal frame had violently quitted?–
Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly Shadow flitted.

Across the sunbeam, and along the wall,
But painted on the air so very dimly,
It hardly veil’d the tapestry at all,
Or portrait frowning grimly.

O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!