THE TWO HOUSES
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N the heart of night,When farers were not near,The left house said to the house on the right,“I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here.” Said the right, cold-eyed:“Newcomer here I am,Hence haler than you with your cracked old hide,Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam. “Modern my wood,My hangings fair of hue;While my windows open as they should,And water-pipes thread all my chambers through. “Your gear is gray,Your face wears furrows untold.”“—Yours might,” mourned the other, “if you held, brother,The Presences from aforetime that I hold. “You have not knownMen’s lives, deaths, toils, and teens;You are but a heap of stick and stone:A new house has no sense of the have-beens. “Void as a drumYou stand: I am packed with these,Though, strangely, living dwellers who comeSee not the phantoms all my substance sees! “Visible in the morningStand they, when dawn drags in;Visible at night; yet hint or warningOf these thin elbowers few of the inmates win. “Babes new-brought-forthObsess my rooms; straight-stretchedLank corpses, ere outborne to earth;Yea, throng they as when first from the ’Byss upfetched. “Dancers and singersThrob in me now as once;Rich-noted throats and gossamered fingersOf heels; the learned in love-lore and the dunce. “Note here withinThe bridegroom and the bride,Who smile and greet their friends and kin,And down my stairs depart for tracks untried. “Where such inbe,A dwelling’s characterTakes theirs, and a vague semblancyTo them in all its limbs, and light, and atmosphere. “Yet the blind folkMy tenants, who come and goIn the flesh mid these, with souls unwoke,Of such sylph-like surrounders do not know.” “—Will the day come,”Said the new one, awestruck, faint,“When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb—And with such spectral guests become acquaint?” “—That will it, boy;Such shades will people thee,Each in his misery, irk, or joy,And print on thee their presences as on me.”
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