XL—AN END OF TRAVEL

Let now your soul in this substantial world Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored;— This spectacle immutably from now The picture in your eye; and when time strikes, And the green scene goes on the instant blind— The ultimate helpers, where your horse to-day Conveyed you dreaming, bear your body dead.

Vailima.

XLI

We uncommiserate pass into the night From the loud banquet, and departing leave A tremor in men’s memories, faint and sweet And frail as music. Features of our face, The tones of the voice, the touch of the loved hand, Perish and vanish, one by one, from earth: Meanwhile, in the hall of song, the multitude Applauds the new performer. One, perchance, One ultimate survivor lingers on, And smiles, and to his ancient heart recalls The long forgotten. Ere the morrow die, He too, returning, through the curtain comes, And the new age forgets us and goes on.

XLII

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.

Mull was astern, Rum on the port, Eigg on the starboard bow; Glory of youth glowed in his soul:  Where is that glory now?

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.

Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone! Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that’s gone!

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone.

XLIII—TO S. R. CROCKETT (On receiving a Dedication)

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races, And winds, austere and pure:

Be it 

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