The Early Poetical Works of Franklin E. Denton

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ...the inexorable guillotine Of darkness cleaves not the continuous light Into sad pieces by the name of days, ) He soared him thro' the twilight voiceless, vast, Brooding o'er the unbounded hole of space. Above, below, around, there rolled and shone Incomputable globes, yet paused he not, But rather shunned their bosoms populous. At last he reached the outskirts of the stars, The boundaries of the fire-pinioned worlds, The frontiers of creation, where they join The immeasurable nothingness beyond. Yet, in the madness of his deep despair, He paused not here, but wildly hurled himself Into the infinite and frigid gloom. No sooner did the blankness and the cold Of that most horrible vacuity Seize his volition than it was depowered, Than all the energies that thused the wings That tireless had sustained so far a flight, Were as if they were not, and he, oh he, Hopeless in spirit, powerless in wing, Shot through the suffocating spissitude Of the bewildering black with a velocity That would arraign a gleam of yonder moon With dragging indolence; yet through it all, He sensed and he conceived, for what can kill, Or numb, or dull the piercing consciousness Of the pure essence of the immortal mind Freed from the Chillon of its sleepy dust? For full a month of our terrestrial time, Down through that frigid smothering of black He fell. Who can conceive the simoom thoughts That must have swept the desert of his soul, As with that consciousness intense he felt His situation--banished from creation; The only something in an endless nothing, If the dense blackness was a substance not; Yet banished by an edict of himself. It was not endless, though it seemed to be, For terminated was that headlong fall; But where? There was a change discernible In the monotonous..