There is rain in the east, and the heavy crow
Along the pasture flyeth low;
While over the moorland's world of bog,
Silently floats the phantom fog.

Whether day or night, it is hard to tell,
And the dull farms drowse in the doubtful spell,
And my sad thoughts mixed with shadows gray,
Rise not with the vague, half-dormant day.

Vaporous fringes, silver-white,
Trail to the vanishing skirts of night,
And up and along the mountain side,
Ghost-white, the giant shadows glide.

So oft through memory's twilight shade,
Wraiths of the dead years flit and fade,
Which never again on earth are caught,
But haunt forever the streams of thought.

Mist monsters they! unreal and vast,
That brood o'er the wrecks of a ruined past —
Dream-genii, born of a troubled mind,
That rise with the sunset to walk with the wind!

I stand where the river eddies whirl
In many a swift and glassy curl,
Where the weeping willows ceaselessly drip,
And the bubbles break on the lily's lip.

What makes the alders shiver so,
As they lean o'er the treacherous pools below?
Do the reeds as they whisper together there,
Guess at the secret of my despair?

Yet well I know these clouds but hide
The visions that glow on the other side;
And the quenchless lamps of love still glow,
In the sad heart's deepest crypts of woe.

For a face looks in through the cloudy rifts,
As the spectral scenery slides and shifts,
And a whisper comes, in a tone divine —
The fog must melt, and the sun shall shine!

Patience! the world in which we seem,
Is only a swiftly changing dream;
A brief mirage of mists and tears,
Resolved by the light of happier years!