One Cell, I Saw, In Which No Man Remained For More Than Four-And-
Twenty Hours; Being Marked For Dead Before He Entered It.
Hard by,
another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor
came--a monk brown-robed, and hooded--ghastly in the day, and free
bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's
extinguisher, and Murder's herald.
I had my foot upon the spot,
where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled;
and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--
through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and
rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.
Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking
the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime
within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices,
as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a
smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of
the State--a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran
before them, like a cruel officer--flowed the same water that
filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.
Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
Giant's--I had some imaginary recollection of an old man
abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he
heard the bell, proclaiming his successor--I glided off, in one of
the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal guarded by four
marble lions.
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