And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,

The hoofs of the horses beat,

Beat into my scalp and my brain,

With never an end to the stream of passing feet,

Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,

Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter,

And here beneath it is all as bad,

For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;

To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?

But up and down and to and fro,

Ever about me the dead men go;

And then to hear a dead man chatter

Is enough to drive one mad.

2.

Wretchedest age, since Time began,

They cannot even bury a man ;

And tho' we paid our tithes in the days that are

gone,

Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read;

It is that which makes us loud in the world of the

dead;

There is none that does his work, not one;

A touch of their office might have sufficed,

But the churchmen fain would kill their church,

As the churches have kill'd their Christ.

3.

See, there is one of us sobbing,

No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying

To his own great self, as I guess ;

And another, a statesman there, betraying His party-secret, fool, to the press;

And yonder a vile physician, blabbing

*The case of his patient-all for what?

To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,

And wheedle a world that loves him not,

For it is but a world of the dead.

4.

Nothing but idiot gabble!

For the prophecy given of old

And then not understood,

Has come to pass as foretold;

Not let any man think for the public good,

But babble, merely for babble.

For I never whisper'd a private affair

Within the hearing of cat or mouse,

No, not to myself in the closet alone,

But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the

house;

Everything came to be known:

Who told him we were there?

5.

Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back

From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used

to lie ;

He has gather'd the bones for his o'ergrown whelp

to crack;

Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die.

6.

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat;

I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,

But I know that he lies and listens mute

In an ancient mansion's crannies and holes :

Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it,

Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls! It is all used up for that.

7.

Tell him now she is standing here at my head;

Not beautiful now, not even kind;

He may take her now; for she never speaks her

mind,

But is ever the one thing silent here.

She is not of us, as I divine;

She comes from another stiller world of the dead,

Stiller, not fairer than mine.

8.

But I know where a garden grows,

Fairer than aught in the world beside,