The Toad In The Skull

A human skull in a churchyard lay; For the church was a wreck, and, toppling old, On the graves of their dead, were the tombstones gray, And crumbling into mold.

And a hideous toad of this skull had made A house, a hermitage, long agone, Where the ivy-tod with many a braid Half-hid his cell of bone.

And the place was dark; and my feet were drawn To the desolate spot where the tottering tombs Seemed sheeted ghosts in the twilight wan Of the yew-invested glooms.

The night her crescent had slimly hung From a single star o’er the shattered wall, And its feeble light on the stone was flung Where I sat to hear him call.

And I heard this heremite toad as he sate In the gloom of his ghastly hermitage To himself and the gloom all hollowly prate, Like a misanthropic sage:

“Oh, beauty is well and wealth to all; But wealth without beauty makes fair: And beauty with wealth brings wooers tall Whom she snares with her golden hair.

“Though beauty be well and be wealth to all, And wealth without beauty draw men, Beauty must come to the vaulted wall, And what is wealth to her then?...

“This skeleton face was beautiful erst; These sockets were brighter than stars; And she bartered her beauty for gold accurst-- But the story is older than Mars!” ...

And he blinked at the moon from his grinning cell, And the darnels and burdocks were stirred, Cold-swept of the wind, and I shuddered.--Well! Perhaps ’twas my heart I had heard.