Chapter 48

There's been a death in the opposite house As lately as to-day. I know it by the numb look Such houses have alway.

The neighbors rustle in and out, The doctor drives away. A window opens like a pod, Abrupt, mechanically;

Somebody flings a mattress out, — The children hurry by; They wonder if It died on that, — I used to when a boy.

The minister goes stiffly in As if the house were his, And he owned all the mourners now, And little boys besides;

And then the milliner, and the man Of the appalling trade, To take the measure of the house. There'll be that dark parade

Of tassels and of coaches soon; It's easy as a sign, — The intuition of the news In just a country town.

XLIX.

We never know we go, — when we are going We jest and shut the door; Fate following behind us bolts it, And we accost no more.

L.

THE SOUL'S STORM.

It struck me every day The lightning was as new As if the cloud that instant slit And let the fire through.

It burned me in the night, It blistered in my dream; It sickened fresh upon my sight With every morning's beam.

I thought that storm was brief, — The maddest, quickest by; But Nature lost the date of this, And left it in the sky.

LI.

Water is taught by thirst; Land, by the oceans passed; Transport, by throe; Peace, by its battles told; Love, by memorial mould; Birds, by the snow.

LII.

THIRST.

We thirst at first, — 't is Nature's act; And later, when we die, A little water supplicate Of fingers going by.

It intimates the finer want, Whose adequate supply Is that great water in the west Termed immortality.