I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,
The living and the dead I see again,
And but my chair is empty; ’mid them all
’Tis I that seem the dead:  they all remain
Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain: 
Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most,
Of sense or spirit to the truly sane; 210
In this abstraction it were light to deem
Myself the figment of some stronger dream;
They are the real things, and I the ghost
That glide unhindered through the solid door,
Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,
And strive to speak and am but futile air,
As truly most of us are little more.

3.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,
        The latest parted thence,
His features poised in genial armistice 220
And armed neutrality of self-defence
Beneath the forehead’s walled preeminence,
While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,
Settles off-hand our human how and whence;
The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears
The infallible strategy of volunteers
Making through Nature’s walls its easy breach,
And seems to learn where he alone could teach. 
Ample and ruddy, the board’s end he fills
As he our fireside were, our light and heat, 230
Centre where minds diverse and various skills
Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;
I see the firm benignity of face,
Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,
The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,
The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips
While Holmes’s rockets, curve their long ellipse,
    And burst in seeds of fire that burst again
        To drop in scintillating rain.

4.

  There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, 240
  Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,
  Of him who taught us not to mow and mope
  About our fancied selves, but seek our scope
In Nature’s world and Man’s, nor fade to hollow trope, Content with our New World and timely bold To challenge the o’ermastery of the Old;
Listening with eyes averse I see him sit
Pricked with the cider of the Judge’s wit
(Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),
While the wise nose’s firm-built aquiline 250
      Curves sharper to restrain
The merriment whose most unruly moods
Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods
      Of silence-shedding pine: 
Hard by is he whose art’s consoling spell
Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,
His look still vernal ’mid the wintry ring
Of petals that remember, not foretell,
The paler primrose of a second spring.

5.

And more there are:  but other forms arise 260
And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes: 
First he from sympathy still held apart
By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,
Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow’s sweep
Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill,