And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,—­
New England’s poet, soul reserved and deep,
November nature with a name of May,
Whom high o’er Concord plains we laid to sleep,
While the orchards mocked us in their white array 270
And building robins wondered at our tears,
Snatched in his prime, the shape august
That should have stood unbent ’neath fourscore years,
The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,
      All gone to speechless dust. 
      And he our passing guest,
Shy nature, too, and stung with life’s unrest,
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,
Who brought ripe Oxford’s culture to our board,
      The Past’s incalculable hoard, 280
Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,
Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet
With immemorial lisp of musing feet;
Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar’s,
Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,
Poet in all that poets have of best,
But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims,
      Who now hath found sure rest,
Not by still Isis or historic Thames,
Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me, 290
But, not misplaced, by Arno’s hallowed brim,
Nor scorned by Santa Croce’s neighboring fames,
  Haply not mindless, wheresoe’er he be,
Of violets that to-day I scattered over him,
      He, too, is there,
After the good centurion fitly named,
Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,
Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,
Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,
Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.

6.

  Yea truly, as the sallowing years 301
Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,
  And that unwakened winter nears,
’Tis the void chair our surest guest receives, ’Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss, ’Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears; We count our rosary by the beads we miss: 
  To me, at least, it seemeth so,
An exile in the land once found divine, 310
  While my starved fire burns low,
And homeless winds at the loose casement whine Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

IV

1.

Now forth into the darkness all are gone,
But memory, still unsated, follows on,
Retracing step by step our homeward walk,
With many a laugh among our serious talk,
Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,
The long red streamers from the windows glide,
      Or the dim western moon
Rocks her skiff’s image on the broad lagoon, 321
And Boston shows a soft Venetian side
In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,
Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;
Or haply in the sky’s cold chambers wide
Shivered the winter stars, while all below,
As if an end were come of human ill,