Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate

With westward steps depart ;

Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate,

And resolute in heart!

These have passed over it, or may have passed!
Now in this crystal tower
Imprisoned by some curious hand at last,
It counts the passing hour.

And as

I gaze, these narrow walls expand;
Before my dreamy eye

Stretches the desert with its shifting sand,

Its unimpeded sky.

And borne aloft by the sustaining blast,

This little golden thread

Dilates into a column high and vast,

A form of fear and dread.

And onward, and across the setting sun,

Across the boundless plain,

The column and its broader shadow run,

Till thought pursues in vain.

The vision vanishes!

These walls again

Shut out the lurid sun,

Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain;

The half-hour's sand is run!

BIRDS OF PASSAGE.

BLACK shadows fall

From the lindens tall,

That lift aloft their massive wall

Against the southern sky;

And from the realms

Of the shadowy elms

A tide-like darkness overwhelms

The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,

And everywhere

A warm, soft, vapor fills the air,

And distant sounds seem near;

And above, in the light

Of the star-lit night,

Swift birds of passage wing their flight Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat

Of their pinions fleet,

As from the land of snow and sleet

They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry

Of their voices high

Falling dreamily through the sky,

But their forms I cannot see.

O, say not so!

Those sounds that flow

In murmurs of delight and woe

Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs

Of the poet's songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of winged words.

This is the cry

Of souls, that high

On toiling, beating pinions, fly,

Seeking a warmer clime.

From their distant flight

Through realms of light

It falls into our world of night,

With the murmuring sound of rhyme.