Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into the seas without a shore;
That aspire,, unto the skies of fire;
By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,-
By the grey woods,- by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp-
There the traveler meets aghast
Sheeted memories of the past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of space- out of time.
But the traveler, travelling through it,
May not- dare not openly view it!
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its king, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of space out of time.