On a sounding stone,
With a blanched thigh-bone,
The bone of a saint, I fear,
Death strikes the hour
Of his wizard power,
And the specters haste to appear.
From their tombs they rise
In sepulchral guise,
Obeying the summons dread,
And gathering ’round,
With obeisance profound,
They salute the King of the Dead.
Then he stands in the middle
And tunes his fiddle,
And plays them a gruesome strain;
And each gibbering wight
In the moon's pale light
Must dance to that wild refrain.
Now the fiddle tells,
As the music swells,
Of the charnel's ghastly pleasures;
And they clatter their bones
As with hideous groans
They reel to those maddening measures.
The churchyard quakes
And the old abbey shakes
To the tread of the midnight host,
And the sod turns black
On each circling track,
Where a skeleton whirls with a ghost.
The night wind moans
In shuddering tones
Through the gloom of the cypress tree,
While the mad rout raves
Over yawning graves,
And the fiddle bow leaps with glee.
So the swift hours fly
Till the reddening sky
Gives warning of daylight near.
Then the first cock-crow
Sends them huddling below
To sleep for another year.
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