But alas! alas! 
The awful time ’twixt moondown and sunrise! 
It is a ghostly time.  A low thick fog
Steamed up and swathed the trees, and overwhelmed
The floating couch with pall on pall of grey. 
The sky was desolate, dull, and meaningless. 
The blazing hues of the last sunset eve,
And the pale magic moonshine that had made
The common, strange,—­all were swept clean away;
The earth around, the great sky over, were
Like a deserted theatre, tomb-dumb;
The lights long dead; the first sick grey of morn
Oozing through rents in the slow-mouldering curtain;
The sweet sounds fled away for evermore;
Nought left, except a creeping chill, a sense
As if dead deeds were strown upon the stage,
As if dead bodies simulated life,
And spoke dead words without informing thought. 
A horror, as of power without a soul,
Dark, undefined, and mighty unto ill,
Jarred through the earth and through the vault-like air.

And on the sleepers fell a wondrous dream,
That dured till sunrise, filling all the cells
Remotest of the throbbing heart and brain. 
And as I watched them, ever and anon
The quivering limb and half-unclosed eye
Witnessed of torture scarce endured, and yet
Endured; for still the dream had mastery,
And held them in a helplessness supine;
Till, by degrees, the labouring breath grew calm,
Save frequent murmured sighs; and o’er each face
Stole radiant sadness, and a hopeful grief;
And the convulsive motion passed away.

Upon their faces, reading them, I gazed,—­
Reading them earnestly, like wondrous book,—­
When suddenly the vapours of the dream
Rose and enveloped me, and through my soul
Passed with possession; will fell fast asleep. 
And through the portals of the spirit-land,
Upon whose frontiers time and space grow dumb,
Quenched like a cloud that all the roaring wind
Drives not beyond the mountain top, I went,
And entering, beheld them in their dream. 
Their world inwrapt me for the time as mine,
And what befel them there, I saw, and tell.

THE INNER DREAM.

It was a drizzly morning where I stood. 
The cloud had sunk, and filled with fold on fold
The chimneyed city; so the smoke rose not,
But spread diluted in the cloud, and fell
A black precipitate on miry streets,
Where dim grey faces vision-like went by,
But half-awake, half satisfied with sleep.

Slave engines had begun their ceaseless growl
Of labour.  Iron bands and huge stone blocks
That held them to their task, strained, shook, until
The city trembled.  Those pale-visaged forms
Were hastening on to feed their groaning strength
With labour to the full.