Uriel, you that in the ageless sun Sit in the awful silences of light, Singing of vision hid from human sight, -- Prometheus, beautiful rebellious one! And you, Deucalion, For whose blind seed was brought the illuming spark, Are you not gathered, now his day is done, Beside the brink of that relentless dark -- The dark where your dear singer's ghost is gone? II Imagined beings, who majestic blend Your forms with beauty! -- questing, unconfined, The mind conceived you, though the quenched mind Goes down in dark where you in dawn ascend. Our songs can but suspend The ultimate silence: yet could song aspire The realms of mortal music to extend And wake a Sibyl's voice or Seraph's lyre -- How should it tell the dearness of a friend? III The simplest is the inexpressible; The heart of music still evades the Muse, And arts of men the heart of man suffuse, And saddest things are made of silence still. In vain the senses thrill To give our sorrows glorious relief In pyre of verse and pageants volatile, And I, in vain, to speak for him my grief Whose spirit of fire invokes my waiting will. IV To him the best of friendship needs must be Uttered no more; yet was he so endowed That Poetry because of him is proud And he more noble for his poetry, Wherefore infallibly I obey the strong compulsion which this verse Lays on my lips with strange austerity -- Now that his voice is silent -- to rehearse For my own heart how he was dear to me. V Not by your gradual sands, elusive Time, We measure your gray sea, that never rests; The bleeding hour-glasses in our breasts Mete with quick pangs the ebbing of our prime, And drip, like sudden rime In March, that melts to runnels from a pane The south breathes on -- oblivion of sublime Crystallizations, and the ruthless wane Of glittering stars, that scarce had range to climb. VI Darkling those constellations of his soul Glimmered, while racks of stellar lightning shot The white, creative meteors of thought Through that last night, where -- clad in cloudy stole -- Beside his ebbing shoal Of life-blood, stood Saint Paul, blazing a theme Of living drama from a fiery scroll Across his stretched vision as in dream -- When Death, with blind dark, blotted out the whole. VII And yet not all: though darkly alien Those uncompleted worlds of work to be Are waned; still, touched by them, the memory Gives afterglow; and now that comes again The mellow season when Our eyes last met, his kindling currents run Quickening within me gladness and new ken Of life, that I have shared his prime with one Who wrought large-minded for the love of men. VIII