University of Virginia Library

A WINTER EVENING.

(An Hour after Nightfall, on Saturday January 17, 1891)

The wild wind in the pines
Surgeth and moaneth,
And the flying snow
Whirls hither and thither,
Tost from the sprays of the firs on the Pincio.
Here, in the dim gloomy Via dell' Mura,
Dark as a torrent in mountainous chasms,
Not a breath of the tempest waves downward upon us:
Sraight down the vast mighty walls hang in silence
Ice-spears and ice-shafts, rigid, unyielding:
Here all the snow-drift lies thick and untrodden,
Cold, white, and desolate save where the red light
Gleams from a window in yonder high turret.
Loud mid the trees of the Medici gardens,
Surgeth the wind, and over the Pincio
Sweeps to the southward the drift of the snowstorm:
Clear to the northward the wan wintry moonshine
Showeth the last pines silent and moveless,
Untouch'd by the wild sweeping wing of the tempest.
Swift in the skies o'er the heights of the Vatican
Flash upon flash, long pulsations of lightning,
And borne afar from the distant Campagna
The long low muttering growls of the thunder.
Wild night of the tempest, with lightning and moonshine,
Thunder afar and the surge of the snow-blast,
The whisper of pines and the glimmer of starlight,
The voice of the wind in the woods of Borghese,
These, these together, and here in the darkness
Here in the dim, gloomy Via dell' Mura,
Nought but the peace of the snow-drift unruffled,
Whitely obscure, save where from the window
High in the walls of the Medici Gardens
Glows a red shining, fierily bloodred.
What lies in the heart of thee, Night, thus so ominous?
What is thy secret, strange joy or strange sorrow?