Explore "The Musidora Sonnet" by Arthur Willis Colton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE clock in some invisible steeple struck one. The great snowflakes / fell thickly, wavering and shrinking, delicate, barren seeds, conscious / of their unfruitfulness. The sputter of the arc lights seemed explosive / to the muffled silence of the street. With a bright corner at either end, / the block was a canon, a passage in a nether world of lurking ghosts, / where a frightened gaslight trembled, hesitated midway. And Noel / Endicott conceived suddenly, between curb and curb, a sonnet, to be / entitled "Dante in Tenth Street," the appearance of it occupying, / in black letter, a half page in the _Monthly Illustrated_, a gloomy / pencilling above, and below it "Noel Endicott." The noiselessness of his / steps enlarged his imagination.
I walked in 19th Street, not the Florentine, / / With ghosts more sad, and one like Beatrice / / Laid on my lips the sanction of her kiss. / / 'Twas