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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: | |
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| The night transforms it to a palace vast | 5 |
| Lit with a thousand lamps from cryptic wires; | |
| The vaporous walls are phantoms of the Past, | |
| Strange with vague spires: | |
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| Huge, peopled monoliths that touch the skies, | |
| Whose indeterminate bases baffle sight, | 10 |
| Each with its Argus, incandescent eyes | |
| Pierces the night: | |
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| Undreamt-of heights of glimmering marble loom | |
| Like some enchanted fabric wrought of air; | |
| Gigantic shafts of insubstantial gloom | 15 |
| Lift, shadowy, there: | |
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| Could fabled Camelot of the poet’s dream | |
| Surpass these towers soaring from the mist?— | |
| These steel-ribbed granite miracles that gleam | |
| Dim amethyst?… | 20 |
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| Slow on the tide, from murky coves remote, | |
| The freighted barges move, laboriously, | |
| While some palatial, golden-lighted boat | |
| Steams for the sea: | |
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| Now that the moon is breaking through the cloud | 25 |
| The radiant halo o’er the City pales; | |
| Shimmer the dusky wharves with mast and shroud | |
| And furlèd sails: | |
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| Soft strains of music, hovering, drift away; | |
| In cloudy turrets toll the spectral bells; | 30 |
| While the sea-voices, from the wastes of grey, | |
| Send faint farewells: | |
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| The homing sloops are sheltered in the slip: | |
| The silence deepens; and up-stream, afar, | |
| A fading lantern on an anchored ship | 35 |
| Seems a lost star. | |
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