The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman

And while the Autumn breathed her sighs,
And dropped a thousand leafy glories,
And all the pathways, and the skies,
Were mindful of his songs and stories,

Nor failed to wear the mingled hues
He loved, and knew so well to render,
But wooed—alas, in vain!—their Muse
For one more tuneful lay and tender,

We paused awhile,—the gathered few
Who came, in longing, not in duty,—
With eyes that full of weeping grew,
To look their last upon his beauty.

Death would not rudely rob that face,
Nor dim its fine Arcadian brightness,
But gave the lines a clearer grace,
And sleep's repose, and marble's whiteness.

And, gazing there on him so young,
We thought of all his ended mission,
The broken links, the songs unsung,
The love that found no ripe fruition;

Till last the old, old question came
To hearts that beat with life around him,

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Why Death, with downward torch aflame,
Had searched our number till he found him?

Why passed the one who poorly knows
That blithesome spell for either fortune,
Or mocked with lingering menace those
Whose pains the final thrust importune;

Or left the toiling ones who bear
The crowd's neglect, the want that presses,
The woes no human soul can share,
Nor look, nor spoken word, confesses.

And from the earth no answer came,
The forest wore a stillness deeper,
The sky and lake smiled on the same,
And voiceless as the silent sleeper.

And so we turned ourselves away,
By earth and air and water chidden,
And left him with them, where he lay,
A sharer of their secret hidden.

And each the staff and shell again
Took up, and marched with memories haunted;
But henceforth, in our pilgrim-strain,
We'll miss a voice that sweetly chaunted!

University of Virginia Library

GEORGE ARNOLD

Greenwood, November 13, 1865