Lloyd Mifflin

New York from the North River

IN deepening shades the haunting vision swims;

A denser greyness settles o’er the stream;

The domes are veiled; the wondrous City dims—

Dims as a dream:

The night transforms it to a palace vast

Lit with a thousand lamps from cryptic wires;

The vaporous walls are phantoms of the Past,

Strange with vague spires:

Huge, peopled monoliths that touch the skies,

Whose indeterminate bases baffle sight,

Each with its Argus, incandescent eyes

Pierces the night:

Undreamt-of heights of glimmering marble loom

Like some enchanted fabric wrought of air;

Gigantic shafts of insubstantial gloom

Lift, shadowy, there:

Could fabled Camelot of the poet’s dream

Surpass these towers soaring from the mist?—

These steel-ribbed granite miracles that gleam

Dim amethyst?…

Slow on the tide, from murky coves remote,

The freighted barges move, laboriously,

While some palatial, golden-lighted boat

Steams for the sea:

Now that the moon is breaking through the cloud

The radiant halo o’er the City pales;

Shimmer the dusky wharves with mast and shroud

And furlèd sails:

Soft strains of music, hovering, drift away;

In cloudy turrets toll the spectral bells;

While the sea-voices, from the wastes of grey,

Send faint farewells:

The homing sloops are sheltered in the slip:

The silence deepens; and up-stream, afar,

A fading lantern on an anchored ship

Seems a lost star.