Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Germany: Vols. XVII–XVIII. 1876–79.
The Royal Portraits
By William Dean Howells (1837–1920)Into each other’s sleepless eyes;
And the daylight into the darkness dies,
From year to year in the palace there:
But they watch and guard that no device
Take either one of them unaware.
The parents of the reigning prince:
Both put off royalty many years since,
With life and the gifts that have always been
Given to kings from God, to evince
His sense of the mighty over the mean.
Of the king; it is something fat and red;
And the neck that lifts the royal head
Is thick and coarse; and a scanty grace
Dwells in the dull blue eyes that are laid
Sullenly on the queen in her place.
’T were well to pleasure in work and sport:
One of the heaven-anointed sort
Who ruled his people with iron sway,
And knew that, through good and evil report,
God meant him to rule and them to obey.
Of the king in his royal palace there;
You find him depicted everywhere,—
In his robes of state, in his hunting-dress,
In his flowing wig, in his powdered hair,—
A king in all of them, none the less;
Over against his consort, whose
Laces, and hoops, and high-heeled shoes
Make her the finest lady of all
The queens or courtly dames you choose,
In the ancestral portrait hall.
Of luring blue and wanton gold,
Of blanchéd rose and crimson bold,
Of lines that flow voluptuously
In tender, languorous curves to fold
Her form in perfect symmetry.
There scarcely would be enough to write
Her guilt in now; and the dead have a right
To our lenient doubt if not to our trust:
So if the truth cannot make her white,
Let us be as merciful as we—must.
But the king was very old when he died,
Rotten with license and lust and pride;
And the usual Virtues came and hung
Their cypress wreaths on his tomb, and wide
Throughout his kingdom his praise was sung.
And faithful subjects are all forbid
To speak of the murder which some one did
One night while she slept in the dark alone:
History keeps the story hid,
And Fear only tells it in undertone.
In the famous Echo-Room, with a bound
Leaps the echo, and round and round
Beating itself against the roof,—
A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound,—
Dies ere its terror can utter proof
And none is suffered to enter there.
His sacred majesty could not bear
To look at it toward the last,
As he grew very old. It opened where
The queen died young so many years past.
But in the palace’s solitude
A harking dread and horror brood,
And a silence, as if a mortal groan
Had been hushed the moment before, and would
Break forth again when you were gone.
In the desolate palace. From year to year
In the wide and stately garden drear
The snows and the snowy blossoms melt
Unheeded, and a ghastly fear
Through all the shivering leaves is felt.
Along the dusk and hollow halls,
And the slumber-broken palace calls
With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep;
And then the ghostly moonlight falls
Athwart the darkness brown and deep.
And through the desert garden blows
The wasted sweetness of the rose;
At noon the feverish sunshine lies
Sick in the walks. But at evening’s close,
When the last, long rays to the windows rise,
Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur
His cruel vigilance and her
Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak
A hopeless hate that cannot stir,
A voiceless hate that cannot speak
And as if she saw her murderer glare
On her face, and he the white despair
Of his victim kindle in wild surmise,
Confronted the conscious pictures stare,—
And their secret back into darkness dies.