the brow Of her Most Sweet Imperious Majesty. Full many a problem his statecraft had solved—      How strangle treason, how soothe turbulent peers, How foil the Pope and Spain, how pay the Fleet—      Mere temporal matters; but this business smelt Strongly of brimstone. Bring back vanished folk! That could not Master Cecil an he would. The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew. Dark were the days that came to Wyndham Towers With that grim secret rusting in its heart. On the sea's side along the fissured wall The lichen spread in patches of dull gold Up to the battlements, at times assailed By sheeted ghosts of mist blown from the sea, Now by the whistling arrows of the sleet Pelted, and thrice of lightning scorched and seamed, But stoutly held from dreary year to year By legions of most venerable rooks, Shrill black-robed prelates of the fighting sort. In the wide moat, run dry with summer droughts Great scarlet poppies lay in drifts and heaps, Like bodies fall'n there in some vain assault. Within, decay and dolor had their court—      Dolor, decay, and silence, lords of all. From room to room the wind went shuddering On some vague endless quest; now pausing here To lift an arras, and then hurrying on, To some fresh clue, belike! The sharp-nosed mouse Through joist and floor discreetly gnawed her way, And for her glossy young a lodging made In a cracked corselet that once held a heart. The meditative spider undisturbed Wove his gray tapestry from sill to sill. Over the transom the stone eagle drooped, With one wing gone, in most dejected state Moulting his feathers. A blue poisonous vine, Whose lucent berry, hard as Indian jade, No squirrel tried his tooth on, June by June On the south hill-slope festered in the sun. Man's foot came not there. It was haunted ground. The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew. An oak stood where an acorn tumbled once, Ages ago, and all the world was strange. Now, in that year King Charles the Second left Forever the soft arms of Mistress Gwynn And wrapt him in that marble where he lies, The moulder'd pile with its entombed Crime Passed to the keep of a brave new-fledged lord, Who, liking much the sane and wholesome air That bent the boughs and fanned the turret's top, Cried, “Here dwell I!”  So fell it on a day The stroke of mallets and the screech of saws In those bleak chambers made such din as stopped The careful spider half-way up his thread, And panic sent to myriad furtive things That dwelt in wainscots and loved not the sun. 

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