As I grow gray.

 Yet while they last how actual they seem!

 Their faces beam;

 I give them all their names,

6

 Bertram and Gilbert, Louis, Frank and James,

 Each with his aims;

 One thinks he is a poet, and writes verse

 His friends rehearse;

 Another is full of law;

 A third sees pictures which his hand can draw

 Without a flaw.

 Strangest of all, they never rest. Day long

 They shift and throng,

 Moved by invisible will,

 Like a great breath which puffs across my sill,

 And then is still;

 It shakes my lovely manikins on the wall;

 Squall after squall,

 Gust upon crowding gust,

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