Windless pestilence

Luckless man

Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,

And, flinching from the insect's little sting, 

In pitiful security keeps watch, 

While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun, 

To which he prays, comes windless pestilence, 

Transparent as a glass of poisoned water

Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling;

She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,

Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,

And every breath of her's as full of ghosts

As a sunbeam with motes.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849), Death's Jest-Book