H. P. Lovecraft

“ Each monstrous creature marks the wondrous glare,
Drops, fades, and vanishes in empty air!
The village train with startled eyes adore,
And count their beads in rev’rence o’er and o’er.
Now fades the light, and dies the raging blast,
The hour of dread and reign of horror past.
Pallid and bruis’d, from out his toppled walls
The panting bailiff with his good wife crawls:
Kind hands attend them, whilst o’er all the town
A strange sweet peace of spirit settles down.
Wonder and fear are still’d in soothing sleep,
As thro’ the breaking clouds the moon rays peep. ”

“ Straight course the monsters thro’ the village street,
Unholy vigour in their flying feet;
Thro’ half-shut blinds the shelter’d peasants peer,
And wax in wonder as they lose in fear.
Th’ excited pack at last their goal perceive,
And the vex’d air with deaf’ning clamour cleave;
The churls, astonish’d, watch th’ unnatural herd
Flock round a cottage at the leader’s word:
Quick spreads the fearsome fact, by rumour blown,
That the doom’d cottage is the bailiff’s own!
Round and around the howling daemons glide,
Whilst the fierce leader scales the vine-clad side ”

“ With fall long gone, and spring too far to cheer,
When little Jean, the bailiff’s son and heir,
Fell sick and threw the doctors in despair.
A child so stout and strong that few would think
An hour might carry him to death’s dark brink,
Yet pale he lay, tho’ hidden was the cause,
And Galens search’d in vain thro’ Nature’s laws.
But stricken sadness could not quite suppress
The roving thought, or wrinkled grandam’s guess:
Tho’ spoke by stealth, ’twas known to half a score
That Dame De Blois rode by the day before ”