WALTER.
I fear, Sir, I have none.
ARTHUR.
Hang nuts in autumn woods? Then 't is your trade,
Spin us a new one. Come! some youth love-mad,
Reading the thoughts within his lady's eyes,
Earnest as One that looks into the Book,
Seeking the road to bliss—
Clothe me this bare bough with your sunny flowers.
WALTER.
The evening heaven is not always dressed
With frail cloud-empires of the setting sun,
Nor are we always in our singing-robes.
I have no song, nor can I make you one;
But, with permission, I will tell a tale.
ARTHUR.
If short and merry, Heaven speed your tongue;
If long and sad, the Lord have mercy on us!
WALTER.
Within a city One was born to toil,
Whose heart could not mate with the common doom
To fall like a spent arrow in the grave.
'Mid the eternal hum, the boy clomb up
Into a shy and solitary youth,
With strange joys and strange sorrows, oft to tears
He was moved, he knew not why, when he has stood
Among the lengthening shadows of the eve,
Such feeling overflowed him from the sky.
'Mong crowds he dwelt, as lonely as a star
Unsphered and exiled, yet he knew no scorn.
Once did he say, "For me, I'd rather live
With this weak human heart and yearning blood,
Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls;
More brave, more beautiful, than myself must be
The man whom truly I can call my Friend;
He must be an Inspirer, who can draw
To higher heights of Being, and aye stand
O'er me in unreached beauty, like the moon;
Soon as he fail in this, the crest and crown
Of noble friendship, he is nought to me.
What so unguessed as Death? Yet to the dead
It lies as plain as yesterday to us.
Let me go forward to my grave alone,
What need have I to linger by dry wells?"
Books were his chiefest friends. In them he read
Of those great spirits who went down like suns,
And left upon the mountain-tops of Death
A light that made them lovely. His own heart
Made him a Poet. Yesterday to him
Was richer far than fifty years to come.
Alchymist Memory turned his past to gold.
When morn awakes against the dark wet earth,
Back to the morn she laughs with dewy sides,
Up goes her voice of larks! With like effect
Imagination opened on his life,
It lay all lovely in that rarer light.