 | The poetical works of Edward Rowland Sill |  |
71
WISDOM AND FAME
A wilderness, made awful with the night—Great glimmering trunks whose tops were hid in gloom,
Vast columns in the blackness broken off,
Between whose ghostly forms, slow-wandering,
A company of lost men sought a path.
Some groped among the dead leaves and fallen boughs
For footprints; but the rattle of the leaves
And crook of stems seemed serpents coiled to strike
Some took the momentary sparks that rode
Upon their straining eyeballs, for far lights,
And followed them.
Some stood apart, in vain
Searching, with horror-widened eyes, for stars.
So, stumbling on, they circled round and round
Through the same mazes.
Then they singled one
To climb a pinnacled height, and see from thence
The landmarks, and to shout from thence their course.
With aching sinews, bleeding feet, bruised hands,
He gained the height; but when they cried to him
They got but maudlin answers,—he had found,
Slaking hot thirst, a fruit that maddened him.
72
But every one that climbed found the ill fruit
And maddened, and gave back but wild replies:
And still in darkness they go wandering, lost.
| The poetical works of Edward Rowland Sill | |