The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (12.1897)

Children of the Mist

By Rosamund Marriott-Watson

About the murky town,

The spectral willows, half-asleep,

Trail their long tresses down
Where the dim tide goes wandering slow,
Sad with perpetual ebb and flow.

The great blind river, cold and wide,
Goes groping by the shore,

And still where water and land divide
He murmurs evermore
The overword of an old song,

The echo of an ancient wrong.

There is no sound ’twixt stream and sky,
But white mists walk the strand,
Waifs of the night that wander by,
Wraiths from the river-land—

While here, beneath the dripping trees,
Stray other souls more lost than these.

he cold airs from the river creep

Voiceless