The tempest with its spoils had drifted in, The air was thick-and in the upper gloom The bat―or something in its shape-was winging; And on the wall, as chilly as a tomb, The Death's-head moth was clinging. That mystic moth, which, with a sense profound And with a grim significance flits round Such omens in the place there seemed to be, For over all there hung a cloud of fear, Yet no portentous shape the sight amazed; But from their tarnished frames dark figures gazed, Not merely with the mimic life that lies Within the compass of Art's simulation: Their souls were looking through their painted eyes With awful speculation. On every lip a speechless horror dwelt; Such earnest wo their features overcast, They might have stirred, or sighed, or wept, or spoken; But, save the hollow moaning of the blast, The stillness was unbroken. No other sound or stir of life was there, From flight to flight, from humid stair to stair, Deserted rooms of luxury and state, Rich hangings, storied by the needle's art, The silent waste of mildew and the moth The sky was pale; the cloud a thing of doubt; Some hues were fresh, and some decayed and duller; But still the BLOODY HAND shone strangely out With vehemence of color! The BLOODY HAND that with a lurid stain The BLOODY HAND significant of crime, O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear, The death-watch ticked behind the panneled oak, And echoes strange and mystical awoke, Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread, But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly, The while some secret inspiration said, That chamber is the ghostly! Across the door no gossamer festoon Swung pendulous-no web-no dusty fringes, No silky chrysalis or white cocoon, About its nooks and hinges. The spider shunned the interdicted room, The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished, One lonely ray that glanced upon a Bed, And yet no gory stain was on the quilt— Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence What human creature in the dead of night Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance? Had sought the door, the window in his flight, Striving for dear existence ? What shrieking spirit in that bloody room Across the sunbeam, and along the wall, O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear, LIFE IN THE SICK ROOM.* Of all the know-nothing persons in this world, commend us to the man who has "never known a day's illness." He is a moral dunce; one who has lost the greatest lesson in life; who has skipped the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, the Sick Chamber. Let him be versed in mathematics, profound in metaphysics, a ripe scholar in the classics, a bachelor of arts, or even a doctor in divinity, yet is he as one of those gentlemen whose education has been neglected. For all his college acquirements, how inferior is he in wholesome knowledge to the mortal who has had but a quarter's gout, or a half-year of ague -how infinitely below the fellow-creature who has been soundly taught his tic-douloureux, thoroughly grounded in the rheumatics, and deeply red in the scarlet fever! And yet, what is more common than to hear a great hulking, florid fellow, bragging of an ignorance, a brutal ignorance, that he shares in common with the pig and the bullock, the generality of which die, proba. bly, without ever having experienced a day's indisposition? To such a monster of health the volume before us will be a sealed book; for how can he appreciate its allusions to physical suffering, whose bodily annoyance has never reached beyond a slight tickling of the epidermis, or the tingling of a foot gone to sleep? How should he, who has sailed through life with a clean bill of health, be able to sympathize with the feelings, or the quiet sayings and doings, of an invalid condemned to a life. long quarantine in his chamber? What should he know of Life in the Sick Room? As little as our poor paralytic grandmother knows of Life in London. *Life in the Sick Room. By an Invalid. Moxon. |