“Listen,” he said presently. In a voice full of tears and deep emotion, a very quiet, a very beautiful voice, he replied to my question. The expression of his eyes turned inwards, there rose in memory the ghostly figure of someone he had loved, perhaps loved still. The whole aspect of the old exiled poet became charged with an intolerable sadness, as he spoke the lines, not to myself, but to this vanished figure--“Shadowed by yearning memory’s raven wing”: HEREAFTER Thou know’st not, sweet, what must remain unknown Through all that my poor words can say or sing, The measure of the love to thee I bring. One day thou wilt, when, by a graven stone That bears a name, thou standest, white, alone, Shadowed by yearning memory’s raven wing, Rained on by blossoms of some wind-torn spring Wherefrom thirst-quenching fruit shall ne’er be grown. Then--power shall rest upon the vanished hand Once too much trembling to thy touch for power; Then--shall my soul at last thy soul command As it might not in Time’s brief fitful hour; And what Life’s fires might neither melt nor burn Shall yield with tears to ashes and the urn. I had my answer. Never again did I venture on a personal question. All our talks came round to poetry in the end. It was his deepest love as well. Sound lawyer he may have been, but inspired poet, to me at least, he certainly was. His own poems he severely deprecated, calling them, with the exception of the “Night Song,” “poor things, though from my heart.” His room, it seems, was littered with them in manuscript, which he rarely tried, and never wished, to sell. Some time later Mr. Alden, Editor of _Harper’s Magazine_, questioned me for information “about a wonderful old gentleman who comes into the office like an emperor, and offers me a poem as though he were parting painfully with a treasure he hardly dared let out of his keeping, and certainly does not wish to sell for cash.” To all, thus, he was a mystery. If he was uncared for, he was at the same time indifferent to human care. Great intellect, great mind, great heart, he seemed to me, a wraith perhaps, but an august, a giant wraith, draped by mysterious shadows, dwelling in a miserable slum, cut off from his kind amid the dim pomp and pageantry of majestic memories.