POEMS OF JAMES RYDER RANDALL
And then uprolled from the rafter’s mold,
Come the dear ones, the departed—
The fair and old ’neath the marigold,
The bold and the broken-hearted—
Till I shudder to think how we rabble on the brink
Of the early broken-hearted.
In mystic trance of my old Romance,
I let all my sorrow and sin go;
Forgetting the graves as they glance and dance
Down—down through the ghastly window—
With column and cross and banners of moss,
Down—down through the Oriel Window.
A purple band from the Phantom Land,
Come the idol-gods I cherished,
And lo! they stand by a throne of sand,
With palsied brows and perished—
And scoop from the shore of the sea no more
The shells of the Past and Perished.
But from those shells ring passion bells,
Till my soul from its sacred duty
Is ravished along with an earthly song,
But a song of love and beauty,
Till the air is aglow with lustrous hair
And dark-eyed songs of beauty.
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