Bowed hearts that hold the saddest memories
Are the most beautiful; and such make sweet
Light happy moods of alien natures which
Their sadness contacts, and so sanctifies.
And such to me is an old, gabled house,
Deserted and neglected and unknown
Within the dreamy hollow of its hills,
Dark, cedared hills and fruitless orchards sear;
With but its host of shrouded memories
Haunting its low and desolate rooms and halls,
Its roomy hearths and cob-webbed crevices.
Here in dim rainy noons I love to sit,
And hear the running rain along the roof,
The creak and crack of noises that are born
Of unseen and mysterious agencies;
The dripping footfalls of the wind adown
Lone winding stairways massy-banistered;
A clapping door and then a sudden hush
That brings a pleasant terror stiffening through
The tingling veins and staring from the eyes.
Then comes the running rain along the roof's
Rain-rotten gables and on rain-stained walls
Invokes vague images and memories
Of all its sometime lords and mistresses,
Until the stale material will assume
All that's clairvoyant, and the fine-strung ear
In quaint far rooms or dusty corridors
Hear wrinkled ladies all beruffled trail
Long haughty silks "miraculously stiff."