Into the road-house of the past! The prince of vagabonds is gone To house among his peers at last. 

 The stainless gallant gentleman, So glad of life, he gave no trace, No hint he even once beheld The spectre peering in his face; 

 But gay and modest held the road, Nor feared the Shadow of the Dust; And saw the whole world rich with joy, As every valiant farer must. 

 I think that old and vasty inn Will have a welcome guest to-night, When Chaucer, breaking off some tale That fills his hearers with delight, 

 Shall lift up his demure brown eyes To bid the stranger in; and all Will turn to greet the one on whom The crystal lot was last to fall. 

 Keats of the more than mortal tongue Will take grave Milton by the sleeve To meet their kin, whose woven words Had elvish music in the weave. 

 Dear Lamb and excellent Montaigne, Sterne and the credible Defoe, Borrow, DeQuincey, the great Dean, The sturdy leisurist Thoreau; 

 The furtive soul whose dark romance, By ghostly door and haunted stair, Explored the dusty human heart And the forgotten garrets there; 

 The moralist it could not spoil, To hold an empire in his hands; Sir Walter, and the brood who sprang From Homer through a hundred lands, 

  Singers of songs on all men's lips, Tellers of tales in all men's ears, Movers of hearts that still must beat To sorrows feigned and fabled tears; 

 Horace and Omar, doubting still What mystery lurks beyond the seen, Yet blithe and reassured before That fine unvexed Virgilian mien; 

 These will companion him to-night, Beyond this iron wintry gloom, When Shakespeare and Cervantes bid The great joy-masters give him room. 

 No alien there in speech or mood, He will pass in, one traveller more; And portly Ben will smile to see The velvet jacket at the door. 

VERLAINE.

 Avid of life and love, insatiate vagabond, With quest too furious for the graal he would have won, He flung himself at the eternal sky, as one Wrenching his chains but impotent to burst the bond. 

 Yet under the revolt, the revel, the despond, What pools of innocence, what crystal benison! As through a riven mist that glowers in the sun, A stretch 

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