Invisible now, in that empty seat,
You sit, who came through the clouds to me,
Swift as a message from over the sea.
My house is always open to you:
Dear spirit, come often and you will find
Welcome, where mind can foregather with mind!
And may we sit together one day
Quietly here, when a word is said
To bring new gladness unto our dead,
Knowing your dream is a dream no more;
And seeing on some momentous pact
Your vision upbuilt as a deathless fact.
Rowland Thirlmere
PRINCETON, MAY, 1917
Here Freedom stood by slaughtered friend and foe,
And, ere the wrath paled or that sunset died,
Looked through the ages; then, with eyes aglow,
Laid them to wait that future, side by side.
(Lines for a monument to the American and British soldiers of the Revolutionary War who fell on the Princeton battlefield and were buried in one grave.)
Now lamp-lit gardens in the blue dusk shine
Through dogwood, red and white;
And round the gray quadrangles, line by line,
The windows fill with light,
Where Princeton calls to Magdalen, tower to tower,
Twin lanthorns of the law;
And those cream-white magnolia boughs embower
The halls of "Old Nassau."
The dark bronze tigers crouch on either side
Where redcoats used to pass;
And round the bird-loved house where Mercer died,
And violets dusk the grass,
By Stony Brook that ran so red of old,
But sings of friendship now,
To feed the old enemy's harvest fifty-fold
The green earth takes the plow.