Night; for never there
  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity             5
  The sun has never visited that city,
    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
    Though present in distempered gloom of thought
  And deadly weariness of heart all day.                      10
    But when a dream night after night is brought
  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
  Recur each year for several years, can any
    Discern that dream from real life in aught?

  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,                15
    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
    The while all change and many vanish quite,
  In their recurrence with recurrent changes
  A certain seeming order; where this ranges                  20
    We count things real; such is memory's might.

  A river girds the city west and south,
    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon               25
  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.

  Upon an easy slope it lies at large
    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest               30
  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.             35

  The city is not ruinous, although
    Great ruins of an unremembered past,
  With others of a few short years ago
    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement         40
  In house or palace front from roof to basement
    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.                 45
    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

  Yet as in some necropolis you find                          50
    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,
  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder                       55
    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
    A woman rarely, now and then a child:
  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth
    To see a little one from birth defiled,                   60
  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

  They often murmur to themselves, they speak
    To one another seldom, for their woe                      65
  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
    To rave in