EVERYBODY
        said so.

    Far be it from me
          to assert that
         what everybody says
            must be true.

    Everybody is,
           often,
         as likely to be
             wrong as right.

    In the general experience,
           everybody has been wrong
               so often,
         and it has taken,
           in most instances,
         such a weary
             while to find out
               how wrong,
            that the authority
            is proved to be fallible.

    Everybody may sometimes be right;
         "but THAT'S no rule,"
            as the ghost
               of Giles Scroggins
            says in the ballad.

    The dread word,
           GHOST,
         recalls me.

    Everybody said
         he looked
              like a haunted man.

    The extent of my present
           claim for everybody is,
         that they
            were so far right.

    He did.

    Who could have seen
           his hollow cheek;
        his sunken brilliant eye;
           his black-attired figure,
           indefinably grim,
         although well-knit
               and well-proportioned;
        his grizzled hair hanging,
           like tangled seaweed,
         about his face,
           - as
             if he had been,
         through his whole life,
            a lonely mark
               for the chafing and
              beating of
                   the great deep of humanity,
         - but might have said
             he looked
                  like a haunted man?

    Who could have observed
           his manner,
         taciturn,
         thoughtful,
           gloomy,
          shadowed by habitual reserve,
           retiring always and jocund never,
          with a distraught air
               of reverting
             to a bygone
              place and time,
           or of listening
               to some old echoes
             in his mind,
         but might have said it
            was the manner
                   of a haunted man?

    Who could have heard
           his voice,
         slow-speaking,
         deep,
           and grave,
          with a natural fulness
               and melody
             in it which
             he seemed
                  to set himself
                       against and stop,
           but might have said it
            was the voice
                   of a haunted man?

    Who that
        had seen him
               in his inner chamber,
           part library and part laboratory,
         - for he was,
           as the world knew,
         far and wide,
           a learned man in chemistry,
         and a teacher on
             whose lips
                  and hands a crowd
                       of aspiring ears
                     and eyes
                       hung daily,
           - who
             that had seen him there,
         upon a winter night,
           alone,
         surrounded by his drugs
               and instruments and books;
        the shadow
               of his shaded lamp
                   a monstrous beetle
               on the wall,
           motionless among a crowd
               of spectral shapes
             raised there
                   by the flickering
                       of the fire
                     upon the quaint
                  objects around him;
        some of these phantoms
         (the reflection of glass vessels
             that held liquids),
          trembling at heart like things
             that knew his power
                   to uncombine them,
               and to give
                 back their component parts
                      to fire and vapour; -
                 who that
                    had seen him then,
             his work done,
               and he pondering
                   in his chair
                 before the rusted
                       grate and red flame,
              moving his thin mouth
                 as if in speech,
               but silent as the dead,
              would not have said
                 that the man seemed
                     haunted and the chamber too?

    Who might not,
           by a very easy flight
               of fancy,
         have believed
             that everything about him
                took this haunted tone,
           and that
             he lived on haunted ground?

    His dwelling
        was so solitary and vault-like,
           - an old,
         retired part
               of an ancient endowment
             for students,
           once a brave edifice,
         planted in an open place,
           but now the obsolete whim
               of forgotten architects;
        smoke-age-and-weather-darkened,
           squeezed on every side
               by the overgrowing
                   of the great city,
         and choked,
           like an old well,
          with stones and bricks;
        its small quadrangles,
           lying down in very pits
               formed by the streets
                   and buildings,
         which,
           in course of time,
          had been
              constructed above
                   its heavy chimney stalks;
        its old trees,
            insulted by the neighbouring smoke,
         which deigned
               to droop so low
             when it
                was very feeble