The Downing legends : Stories in Rhyme :: :: University of Virginia Library

But when the hour of midnight fell,
No doubt, no doubt, there was a hell!
He heard its awful legions come
Through distant gloom with swelling hum,
As though Apollyon's rebel sprites
That moment fell from Eden's heights,
An avalanche of sin and woe,
Tremendous e'en in overthrow.
Afar he heard them; then anear;
A levin brood, both there and here;
Their pinions filling night with soughs,
And smiting 'thwart the groaning boughs,

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As though contending tempests drove
On mighty pens along the grove.

The air was ghastly overhead
With monsters fit to fright the dead:
The shapes that fallen angels wear
To symbolize their fierce despair:
Unshriven ghouls in winding sheets,
Fantastic hydras, swart afreets,
Titanic dragons winged with fire,
Or formless forms—chimaeras dire:
With clouds of weirdly pigmy things
Who whirred like bats on leathery wings,
All settling black on either hand
And smutting miles of forest land.

Behind arrived the wizard broods
In pairs, in flocks, in multitudes,
The women flaunting through the gloom
On shooting switch or bouncing broom;
The men astride of bucking goat,
Or wayward calf, or wheezing shoat.
Of every age and rank they came,
The lowly scrub, the dainty dame,
The ruffled squire, the ragged boor,
The Indian tramp, the smirking moor,
The puckered hag, the brazen jade,
With here and there a rosy maid
Whose visage wore a seraph-smile,
Yet had an undergleam of guile.