The Spectre of the ‘Golden Boy’

[Those who have read Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Demonology’
will understand to what supposed incident the following
rather grewsome and wild lines allude, and by what
superstition they have been suggested. There is, doubtless,
if all were known, as much truth in the assumed ‘facts’
as fiction requires.]

You have heard of the Thin at whose whispered name—
(He appeareth of flesh, but, in truth, is flame)—
All faces grow pales in the midnight room;
You have heard that he mimics your future doom.

But not here shall you see him. Go sleep alone,
And, at dead of the night, on the old hearth-stone
Of the chamber that closes the winding stair,
Ask your eyes what dread vision is standing there!

O’er the turretted roof and the giant trees,
That were stooping and whisp’ring beneath the breeze,
A sensation of doubt and of fear went straying,
And something the trees to themselves were saying.

Or, perhaps, they were muttering, each to each,
And relating their horror in eldritch speech,
With those shudder-like, wonder-like, waving ways,
Of the gold-seeming boy and his tawny blaze.

For a something has passed them, whose sight appals—
It has passed, and has entered the castle walls;
It shall frighten away the protecting gloom
Of that stair-approached, tapestried, ancient room.

On the hearthstone the embers are burning low,
And the sleeper is tossing him to and fro,
And the room’s curious paneling creeps with beams,
Which misgivingly shimmer like ghostly dreams.

On the lily-white hand and the cheek’s young bloom
Of the stranger who sleeps in that Gothic room,
The expiring rays from the ashes seem
To alight with regretful and warning beam.

But a sudden effulgence of flame has rolled,
Like a wondrous outshining of burning gold,
And has raised in such tempest of light and glare,
That the sleeper has started with bristling hair.

And, behold, on the hearth-stone a golden child,
And all gold seems the fire from his eyes so wild,
And his limbs and his locks flow with pallid heat,
And he stands upon glittering golden feet.

But his throat is deep-gashed with a blood-red ring,
And he leans in a posture as if to spring;
And he points to the sleeper—no sound is heard—
But he points, and he gazes—and not a word.

Ah! did he who beheld the unearthly flash
Of the gold-shining boy with his neck’s red gash,
Yet fulfil in his age the prediction dread
That once haunted his youth in that Gothic bed?

If he did, ’twas the mind that was sicklied o’er
With the guesses and lies of a mocking lore;
‘Tis the fiends who are scared, if they meet disdain,
They are fiends who infest but the haunted brain.