Welcome, October

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 “The skies they were ashen and sober;        The leaves they were crispéd and sere—        The leaves they were withering and sere;  It was night in the lonesome October        Of my most immemorial year;  It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,        In the misty mid region of Weir—  It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,        In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.” (First stanza of “Ulalume” by Edgar Allen Poe)

The Lightning Rod Man

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“The stranger still stood in the exact middle of the cottage, where he had first planted himself. His singularity impelled a closer scrutiny. A lean, gloomy figure. Hair dark and lank, mattedly streaked over his brow. His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt. The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor: his strange walking-stick vertically resting at his side.”


The Lightning-Rod Man By Herman Melville (1819–1891)


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