Then down the long street having slowly stolen, His heart foreshadowing all calamity, His eyes upon the stones, he reach’d the home Where Annie lived and loved him, and his babes 685 In those far-off seven happy years were born; But finding neither light nor murmur there (A bill of sale gleam’d thro’ the drizzle) crept Still downward thinking ‘dead or dead to me!’ Down to the pool and narrow wharf he went, 690 Seeking a tavern which of old he knew, A front of timber-crost antiquity, So propt, worm-eaten, ruinously old, He thought it must have gone; but he was gone Who kept it; and his widow, Miriam Lane, 695 With daily-dwindling profits held the house; A haunt of brawling seamen once, but now Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men. There Enoch rested silent many days. But Miriam Lane was good and garrulous, 700 Nor let him be, but often breaking in, Told him with other annals of the port, Not knowing—Enoch was so brown, so bow’d So broken—all the story of his house. His baby’s death, her growing poverty, 705 How Philip put her little ones to school, And kept them in it, his long wooing her, Her slow consent, and marriage, and the birth Of Philip’s child: and o’er his countenance No shadow past, nor motion: anyone, 710 Regarding, well had deem’d he felt the tale Less than the teller: only when she closed ‘Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost’ He, shaking his gray head pathetically, Repeated muttering ‘cast away and lost;’ 715 Again in deeper inward whispers ‘lost!’ But Enoch yearn’d to see her face again; ‘If I might look on her sweet face again And know that she is happy.’ So the thought Haunted and harass’d him, and drove him forth, 720 At evening when the dull November day Was growing duller twilight, to the hill. There he sat down gazing on all below; There did a thousand memories roll upon him, Unspeakable for sadness. By and by 725 The ruddy square of comfortable light, Far-blazing from the rear of Philip’s house, Allured him, as the beacon-blaze allures The bird of passage, till he madly strikes Against it, and beats out his weary life. 730 For Philip’s dwelling fronted on the street, The latest house to landward; but behind, With one small gate that open’d on the waste, Flourish’d a little garden square and wall’d: And in it throve an ancient evergreen, 735 A yewtree, and all around it ran a walk Of shingle, and a walk divided it: But Enoch shunn’d the middle walk and stole Up by the wall, behind the yew; and thence That which he better might have shunn’d, if griefs 740 Like his have worse or better, Enoch saw.