And smiling in the noonday sun.
Such, my dear friend, has been thy life.
’Twere vain to wish it ever thus to be,
For every stream must some time reach the sea.
There lived in my youth on the lower corner of Summer and Spring streets an elderly gentleman of kind words and gentle speech, who, though living a distance from my home, early attracted me and found a lasting place in my memory. From 1806 to 1819, he had been treasurer of the town, and was some years a teacher in what was later called the high school. His name was Benjamin Drew, and he was the father of my long time friend, Benjamin Drew, who died in 1903. He was something of a poet, and his son told the story that one time when asked to contribute an inscription to be placed on the gravestone of his brother-in-law, Barnabas Holmes, he composed the following:
By temperance taught, a few advancing slow,
To distant fate by easy journeys go;
Calmly they lie them down like evening sheep,—
On their own woolly fleeces softly sleep.
Objection was made to the inscription by the family of Mr. Holmes, it appearing too personal, as Mr. Holmes had been a dealer in mutton. Like most emasculated poetry the substitute adopted was tame—as follows: