Years blank with hardship never speak a word, Live in the soul to make the being stirred; Towns can be prisons, where the spirit dulls Away from mates and ocean-wandering hulls, Away from all bright water and great hills And sheep-walks, where the curlews cry their fills; Away in towns, where eyes have nought to see But dead museums and miles of misery, And floating life unrooted from man’s need, And miles of fish-hooks baited to catch greed, And life made wretched out of human ken, And miles of shopping women served by men. So, if the penman sums my London days, Let him but say that there were holy ways, Dull Bloomsbury streets of dull brick mansions old, With stinking doors, where women stood to scold, And drunken waits at Christmas with their horn, Droning the news, in snow, that Christ was born; And windy gas-lamps and the wet roads shining, And that old carol of the midnight whining, And that old room (above the noisy slum), Where there was wine and fire and talk with some Under strange pictures of the wakened soul, To whom this earth was but a burnt-out coal. O Time, bring back those midnights and those friends, Those glittering moments that a spirit lends, That all may be imagined from the flash, The cloud-hid god-game through the lightning gash, Those hours of stricken sparks from which men took Light to send out to men in song or book. Those friends who heard St. Pancras’s bells strike two Yet stayed until the barber’s cockerel crew, Talking of noble styles, the Frenchman’s best, The thought beyond great poets not expressed, The glory of mood where human frailty failed, The forts of human light not yet assailed, Till the dim room had mind, and seemed to brood, Binding our wills to mental brotherhood, Till we became a college, and each night Was discipline and manhood and delight, Till our farewells, and winding down the stairs At each grey dawn had meaning that Time spares, That we, so linked, should roam the whole world round Teaching the ways our brooding minds had found, Making that room our Chapter, our one mind, Where all that this world soiled should be refined.