We two, the remnant. All the rest Are cold and quiet. You nor I, Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid, May ring them back from where they lie. No fame delays oblivion For them, but something yet survives: A record written fair, could we But read the book of scattered lives. There’ll be a page for Leffingwell, And one for Lingard, the Moon-calf; And who knows what for Clavering, Who died because he couldn’t laugh? Who knows or cares? No sign is here, No face, no voice, no memory; No Lingard with his eerie joy, No Clavering, no Calverly. We cannot have them here with us To say where their light lives are gone, Or if they be of other stuff Than are the moons of Ilion. So, be their place of one estate With ashes, echoes, and old wars,-- Or ever we be of the night, Or we be lost among the stars. LEFFINGWELL I--THE LURE No, no,--forget your Cricket and your Ant, For I shall never set my name to theirs That now bespeak the very sons and heirs Incarnate of Queen Gossip and King Cant. The case of Leffingwell is mixed, I grant, And futile seems the burden that he bears; But are we sounding his forlorn affairs Who brand him parasite and sycophant? I tell you, Leffingwell was more than these; And if he prove a rather sorry knight, What quiverings in the distance of what light May not have lured him with high promises, And then gone down?--He may have been deceived; He may have lied,--he did; and he believed. II--THE QUICKSTEP The dirge is over, the good work is done, All as he would have had it, and we go; And we who leave him say we do not know How much is ended or how much begun. So men have said before of many a one; So men may say of us when Time shall throw Such earth as may be needful to bestow On you and me the covering hush we shun. Well hated, better loved, he played and lost, And left us; and we smile at his arrears; And who are we to know what it all cost, Or what we may have wrung from him, the buyer? The pageant of his failure-laden years Told ruin of high price. The place was higher. III--REQUIESCAT We never knew the sorrow or the pain Within him, for he seemed as one asleep-- Until he faced us with a dying leap, And with a blast of paramount, profane, And vehement valediction did explain To each of us, in words that we shall keep, Why we were not to wonder or to weep, Or ever dare to wish him back again. He may be now an amiable shade, With merry fellow-phantoms unafraid Around him--but we do not ask. We know That he would rise and haunt us horribly, And be with us o’ nights of a certainty. Did we not hear him when he told us so? CLAVERING