Edmund Clarence Stedman

George Arnold

Greenwood, November 13, 1865

We stood around the dreamless form
⁠Whose strength was so untimely shaken,
Whose sleep not all our love could warm,
⁠Nor any dearest voice awaken;

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,
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!