Bitter-Sweet

Excerpt

  Winter’s wild birthnight!  In the fretful East
  The uneasy wind moans with its sense of cold,
  And sends its sighs through gloomy mountain gorge,
  Along the valley, up the whitening hill,
  To tease the sighing spirits of the pines,
  And waste in dismal woods their chilly life. 
  The sky is dark, and on the huddled leaves—­
  The restless, rustling leaves—­sifts down its sleet,
  Till the sharp crystals pin them to the earth,
  And they grow still beneath the rising storm. 
  The roofless bullock hugs the sheltering stack,
  With cringing head and closely gathered feet,
  And waits with dumb endurance for the morn. 
  Deep in a gusty cavern of the barn
  The witless calf stands blatant at his chain;
  While the brute mother, pent within her stall,
  With the wild stress of instinct goes distraught,
  And frets her horns, and bellows through the night. 
  The stream runs black; and the far waterfall
  That sang so sweetly through the summer eyes,
  And swelled and swayed to Zephyr’s softest breath,
  Leaps with a sullen roar the dark abyss,
  And howls its hoarse responses to the wind. 
  The mill is still.  The distant factory,
  That swarmed yestreen with many-fingered life,
  And bridged the river with a hundred bars
  Of molten light, is dark, and lifts its bulk,
  With dim, uncertain angles, to the sky.