In waking trance, or midnight dream—
In an hour that hath no returning—
From Dancy’s mount I saw the gleam
Of a horrid altar burning.
Wild and strange was the gloomy hall
Where that fiery altar stood—
Of human bones was the jagged wall,
Cemented with human blood.
Grim, in the light uncertain and dull,
Did an awful fiend like a monarch sit;
His crown was the half of a cloven skull,
His sceptre a brand from the bottomless pit.
Grim, in the light uncertain and dull,
Did an awful fiend like a monarch sit;
His crown was the half of a cloven skull,
His sceptre a brand from the bottomless pit.
And thoughts came, all haggard and wild,
And bowed at the altar stone;
And age, and youth, and the infant child,
They brought to that horrid one.
The fire of the altar burned alway,
And ever the smoke of the offerings came;
And the foul fiend quaffed their blood, and laughed,
As they howled in folding flame.
Yet on they swept, and hundreds leapt
To the fire-god’s open throat,
And the shriek, and wail, and crackling flame,
Blent fierce with the demon’s note.
A father came from his own bright hearth,
To offer an offering there;
‘Twas his beautiful son, a child of mirth,
Smiling and rosy fair.
His soft hair floated in golden curls
His snow-white forehead about,
And two bright rows of polished pearls
From his parted lips looked out.
The demon father twined his hand
In that cherub’s wealth of hair,
And dashed his son on the altar-stone
And left him to perish there.
The fire shrunk back from its shrieking prey,
And hissed with its tongues of flame,
Then leaping above him as there he lay,
Like a howling devil came.
The smoke rolled up, like the smoke of hell,
From his tresses of golden hair;
The fiend’s loud laugh shook the horrid cell,
Till the blackened bones lay bare.
And then a haggard, ruined son
Came dragging his father’s palsied form,
And his shoulder o’er an axe he bare,
With his brother’s life-blood warm.
The father fell on his feeble knees,
And begged for ‘one hour,’ for ‘only one!’
But little did care for the old man’s prayer,
That parricidal son.
He plunged the axe, with a giant’s force,
In the brain of his gray-haired sire,
And lightly he seized the quivering corpse,
And gave to the raging fire.
Then backward he turned to his own fire-side,
And his nursing infant slew;
And his young, and frantic, and agonized bride,
To the demons altar drew.
He wreathed her tresses of long dark hair
His bloody arm around,
And whirled her light form through the sulphurous air—
The flames her death-shriek drowned.
Through the smoking brands the blackened blood
Come oozing down in a sluggish stream,
And simmering there filled all the air
With its dank and noisome steam.
Oh, Righteous God! ‘twas an awful sight;
The tortures of hell were outdone;
Nor mortal’s pen could its terrors write,
As the maddened host swept on.
Fast, fast they came, and their victims hurl’d
To the red flame’s wild control;
In horror I gazed, till my fired brain whirled,
And darkness swept over my soul.
What terrible flame!—what funeral pyre
Burned thus like the flame of the pit?
Oh, Mortal! know ‘twas the altar-fire
By the Breath of Intemperance lit.
George Shepard Burleigh
