C.

GEORDIE TO HIS TOBACCO-PIPE.

  Good pipe, old friend, old black and colored friend,
  Whom I have smoked these fourteen years and more,
  My best companion, faithful to the end,
  Faithful to death through all thy fiery core,

  How shall I sing thy praises, or proclaim
  The generous virtues which I’ve found in thee? 
  I know thou carest not a whit for fame,
  And hast no thought but how to comfort me,

  And serve my needs, and humor every mood;
  But love and friendship do my heart constrain
  To give thee all I can for much of good
  Which thou hast rendered me in joy and pain.

  Say, then, old honest meerschaum! shall I weave
  Thy history together with my own? 
  Of late I never see thee but I grieve
  For him whose gift thou wert—­forever gone!

  Gone to his grave amidst the vines of France,
  He, all so good, so beautiful, and wise;
  And this dear giver doth thyself enhance,
  And makes thee doubly precious in mine eyes.

  For he was one of Nature’s rarest men,—­
  Poet and preacher, lover of his kind,
  True-hearted man of God, whose like again
  In this world’s journey I may never find.

  I know not if the shadow of his soul,
  Or the divine effulgence of his heart,
  Has through thy veins in mystic silence stole;
  But thou to me dost seem of him a part.

  His hands have touched thee, and his lips have drawn,
  As mine, full many an inspiring cloud
  From thy great burning heart, at night and morn;
  And thou art here, whilst he lies in his shroud!

  And here am I, his friend and thine, old pipe! 
  And he has often sat my chair beside,
  As he was wont to sit in living type,
  Of many companies the flower and pride,—­

  Sat by my side, and talked to me the while,
  Invisible to every eye save mine,
  And smiled upon me as he used to smile
  When we three sat o’er our good cups of wine.

  Ah, happy days, when the old Chapel House,
  Of the old Forest Chapel, rang with mirth,
  And the great joy of our divine carouse,
  As we hobnobbed it by the blazing hearth!

  We never more, old pipe, shall see those days,
  Whose memories lie like pictures in my mind;
  But thou and I will go the self-same ways,
  E’en though we leave all other friends behind.

  And for thy sake, and for my own, and his,
  We will be one, as we have ever been,
  Thou dear old friend, with thy most honest phiz,
  And no new faces come our loves between.

II.

  Thou hast thy separate virtues, honest pipe! 
  Apart from all the memory of friends: 
  For thou art mellow, old, and black, and ripe;
  And the good weed that in its smoke ascends