Classic Poem

The temperate air is filled with a gray mist,
Which thickens to a dense cloud when the eye
To make out forms of distant things doth try,
And whose close fold the sunbeams doth resist
The ground is soaked and darkened with the rain,
And in the road slow carriage wheels have rolled
Deep ruts, that little pools of water hold,
And in the path my steps leave footprints plain
In the sleeping trees no life is visible;
And, with this ghostly mist wrapped all around
Their branches, fancy makes them seem as bound
In some far northern land by wizard's spell —
Some land into whose wastes I enter now,
And feel the same weird power to which they bow.