Explore "Tales of a Wayside Inn" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He ended: and a kind of spell / Upon the silent listeners fell. / His solemn manner and his words / Had touched the deep, mysterious chords, / That vibrate in each human breast / Alike, but not alike confessed. / The spiritual world seemed near; / And close above them, full of fear, / Its awful adumbration passed, / A luminous shadow, vague and vast. / They almost feared to look, lest there, / Embodied from the impalpable air, / They might behold the Angel stand, / Holding the sword in his right hand.
At last, but in a voice subdued, / Not to disturb their dreamy mood, / Said the Sicilian: "While you spoke, / Telling your legend marvellous, / Suddenly in my memory woke / The thought of one, now gone from us,- / An old Abate, meek and mild, / My friend and teacher, when a child, / Who sometimes in those days of old / The legend of an Angel told, / Which ran, as I remember, thus."