When thus Elbert’s cloak Was mine, and mine was his, and both held both, No proof could have convinced me in those days His peer had ever liv’d. What seem’d in him So mild and beautiful, was more than marks Mere difference between a porcupine Provok’d and peaceable. The kind was new; Not human, so angelic. Ay, that soul, As pure as loving, and as fine as frank, I half believe to-day, as I did then, Stood strange amid his comrades of the play As dogwood, wedded to the skies of spring, White in a wilderness of wintry pines. Ah me, could all find all on earth so dear, Christ’s work were common. I had died for him. In fact, to shield the rogue, I just escap’d That very fate a score of times or more, Bluft, bruis’d, and battling for him on the green. IV. Our love kept warm until our school-day-sun Had set; and afterwards the smouldering fires Were fed by letters, and rekindl’d oft By friction of a frequent intercourse Through visits in vacations; then, for years, Behind it there was left a lingering light Pervading moods of memory like the rays Pour’d through a prism, wherein the commonest hues Will spray to uncommon colors when they break. In truth, I never see to-day a face Where flash the kindling feelings of a boy, But back of it, I seem to feel the warmth Of Elbert’s heart. No school-boy past me bounds But his dear presence comes to leap the years, And rush on recollection, with a force That brings from depths of joy, still’d long ago, A spray as fresh as dash’d from them when first They stream’d in cataracts. With love like his To flood its brim, my soul appear’d so full That, overflowing at each human touch, Its pleasures could not stagnate. But, you know How fly the clouds above us, and in drought The old springs fail; and long we liv’d apart. V. Then Elbert, when we met, talk’d much of this: How, all its chairs made vacant one by one, Th’ applause rose thinner at his bachelor-club; How, brief as birds’, are human mating-times; How men, mere songs forgot, withdraw to nests— To homes—their worlds, where all the sky is fill’d With sunny smiles they love, and shadowy locks. How sweet were life whose light and shade were these! “We, Norman,” said he, “were contented once; To love each other only; but men part; And I confess that, while this light of love Plays lambent round so many glowing lips, I feel as chill, and lost, and out of place, As one lone dew-drop, prison’d in a shade Of universal noon.” “The sun,” said I, “Will free it, by and by. Our time will come.”