Was wreck'd and pick'd up by the smuggler boat
Of a certain prowling Candiote;
And, being young and hale, was sold
By the Greek a bondsman to the Turk.
Zillah, his wife, wax'd white and old.
Rachel, his daughter, loved not work,
But walk'd by the light of her own dark eyes
In wicked ways for the sake of gain.
Meanwhile, Israel's destinies
Survived the scorching stake, and Spain
At length grew weary of burning men,
When hunger'd, and haggard, and gaunt, these two
Forlorn Jew women crept again
Into Cordova; because they knew
Where Rabbi Ben Ephraim by stealth,
When he turn'd his back on his own house-door,
Had buried the whole of his wondrous wealth
In the evil place; and they two were poor.

VII.

So poor indeed, they had been constrain'd
To filch from the refuse flung out to the streets
'Mid the rags and onion-peelings rain'd
Where the town's worst gutter's worst filth greets
With his strongest gust and most savoury sweets
Those blots and failures of Human Nature,
Refused a name in her nomenclature,
That spawn themselves toward night, and bend
To finger the husks and shucks heap'd there,
The wretched, rat-bitten candle-end
Which, found by good luck, they had treasured with care
Not a whit less solemn than tho' it were
That famous work of the son of Uri,
The candlestick of candlesticks,
—He the long-lost light of Jewry,
Whose almond bowls and scented wicks
Were the boast of the desert, and Salem's glory
Of the knops and flowers, with his branches six!
For this impov'rish'd, curtail'd, flaw'd,
Maltreated, worried, gnaw'd and claw'd
Remnant of what perchance made bright
Once, for laughter and delight,
Some chamber gay, with arras hung,
Whose marbles, mirrors, and flowers among
A lover, his lady's lute above,
To a dear dark-eyelash'cl listener sung
Of the flame of a never-dying love,
—Little heeding, meanwhile, the fitful spite
Of the night-wind's mad and mocking spright,
Which stealthily in at the lattice sprung,
And was wrying the taper's neck apace,
Must now, with its hungry half-starved light,
Make bold the shuddering flesh to face
The sepulchre's supernatural night,
And the Powers of the Dark keeping guard on the place.

VIII.

And, when to the place of tombs they came,
The spotted moon sunk. Night stood bare
In the waste unlighted air
Wide-arm'd, waiting, and aware,
To horribly hem them in. The flame
The little candle feebly gave,
As it wink'd and winced from grave to grave,
Went fast to furious waste; the same
As a fever-famisht human hope
That is doom'd, from grief to grief, to grope
On darkness blind to a doubtful goal,
And, sway'd by passion here and there
In conflict with some vast despair,
Consumes the substance of the soul
In wavering ways about the world.
The deep enormous night unfurl'd
Her banner'd blackness left and right,
Fold heap'd on fold, to mock such light
With wild defiance; no star pearl'd
The heavy pall, but horror hurl'd
Shadow on shadow; while for spite
The very graves kept out of sight,
And Heaven's sworn hatred, winning might
From earth's ill-will, with darkness curl'd
Darkness, all space confounding quite,
So to engender night on night.

IX.

"Rachel, Rachel, for ye are tall,
Lift the light along the wall."
"Mother, mother, give me the hand,
And follow!"
                    " What see ye, Rachel?"

X.

                                                                A strand
Of chorded colours, clear to be seen
By the main black dominant, twined between
The scarlet, the golden, and the green.

XI.

"Rachel, Rachel, ye walk so fast!"
"Mother, the light will barely last."
"What see ye, Rachel?"

XII.

                                             Things that dangle
Hairy and grey o'er the wall's choked angle
From something dull, in hue and shape
Like a Moor's head cut off at the nape.

XIII.

"Once! twice! thrice! . . . the earth sounds hollow.
Mother, give me the hand, and follow."
"Rachel, the flame is backward blowing,
Pursued by the darkness. Where are we going?
The ground is agroan with catacombs!
What see ye, Rachel?"

XIV.

                                        Yonder comes
A thorn-tree with a desperate arm
Flung out fierce in wild alarm
Of something which, it madly feels,
The night to plague it yet conceals.
No help it gets tho'! An owl dash'd out
O' the darkness, steering his ghostliness thither,
Pry'd in at the boughs, and pass'd on with a shout
From who-knows-whence to who-knows-whither:
The unquiet Spirit abroad on the air
Moved with a moan that way, and spent
A moment or more in the effort to vent
On the tortured tree which he came to scare
The sullen fit of his discontent,
But, laughing low as he grew aware
Of the long-already-imposed despair
Of the terrified thing he had paused to torment,
He pass'd, pursuing his purpose elsewhere,
And follow'd the whim of his wicked bent:
A rheumy glow-worm, come to peer
Into the hollow trunk, crawl'd near,
And glimmer'd awhile, but intense fear
Or tame connivance with something wrong
Which the night was intending, quench'd ere long
His lantern. Therefore the tree remains,
For all its gestures void and vain,
Which still at their utmost fail to explain
Any natural cause for the terror that strains