The night grows chill, as if it felt a breath
     Blown from that frozen city where he lies. 
     All things turn strange.  The leaf that rustles here
     Has more than autumn’s mournfulness.  The place
     Is heavy with his absence.  Like fixed eyes
     Whence the dear light of sense and thought has fled,
     The vacant windows stare across the lawn. 
     The wise sweet spirit that informed it all
     Is otherwhere.  The house itself is dead.

     O autumn wind among the sombre pines,
     Breathe you his dirge, but be it sweet and low. 
     With deep refrains and murmurs of the sea,
     Like to his verse—­the art is yours alone. 
     His once—­you taught him.  Now no voice but yours! 
     Tender and low, O wind among the pines. 
     I would, were mine a lyre of richer strings,
     In soft Sicilian accents wrap his name.

     SEA LONGINGS

     The first world-sound that fell upon my ear
     Was that of the great winds along the coast
     Crushing the deep-sea beryl on the rocks—­
     The distant breakers’ sullen cannonade. 
     Against the spires and gables of the town
     The white fog drifted, catching here and there
     At overleaning cornice or peaked roof,
     And hung—­weird gonfalons.  The garden walks
     Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers
     Lay dead the sweets of summer—­damask rose,
     Clove-pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers
     Only keen salt-sea odors filled the air. 
     Sea-sounds, sea-odors—­these were all my world. 
     Hence is it that life languishes with me
     Inland; the valleys stifle me with gloom
     And pent-up prospect; in their narrow bound
     Imagination flutters futile wings. 
     Vainly I seek the sloping pearl-white sand
     And the mirage’s phantom citadels
     Miraculous, a moment seen, then gone. 
     Among the mountains I am ill at ease,
     Missing the stretched horizon’s level line
     And the illimitable restless blue. 
     The crag-torn sky is not the sky I love,
     But one unbroken sapphire spanning all;
     And nobler than the branches of a pine
     Aslant upon a precipice’s edge
     Are the strained spars of some great battle-ship
     Plowing across the sunset.  No bird’s lilt
     So takes me as the whistling of the gale
     Among the shrouds.  My cradle-song was this,
     Strange inarticulate sorrows of the sea,
     Blithe rhythms upgathered from the Sirens’ caves. 
     Perchance of earthly voices the last voice
     That shall an instant my freed spirit stay
     On this world’s verge, will be some message blown
     Over the dim salt lands that fringe the coast
     At dusk, or when the tranced midnight droops
     With weight of stars, or haply just as dawn,
     Illumining the sullen purple wave,
     Turns the gray pools and willow-stems to gold.