Shadows (Howe)/Patri et Amico

PATRI ET AMICO

I
THE SUNRISE

LOW out the candle, day is come;
The watchers need no other light
Than that which floods the solemn room
Where life is passing with the night.

Across the smiling acres green,
Across the point, the bay, the hills,
Strong, like the soul that loved the scene,
The tide of dawn the chamber fills.

Blow out the candle—small his care
Whose mortal light burns, ah! so dim;
Haply his vision opens where
The eternal sunrise shines for him.

Yes, day is bright about his bed,
And night has vanished with his breath.
Lo! on his face, all shadows fled,
The morning majesty of death.

II
THE TRAVELLERS

HEY made them ready and we saw them go
Out of our very lives;
Yet this world holds them all,
And soon it must befall
That we shall know
How this one fares, how that one thrives;
And one day—who knows when?
They shall be with us here again.

Another traveller left us late
Whose life was as the soul of ours
A stranger guest went with him to the gate,
And closed it breathing back a breath of flowers.
And what the eyes we loved now look upon,
What industries the hands employ,
In what new speech the tongue hath joy,
We may not know—until one day,
And then another, as our toil is done,
The same still guest shall visit us,
And one by one
Shall take us by the hand and say,
"Come with me to the country marvellous,
Where he has dwelt so long beyond your sight.
'Twere idle waiting for his own return
That ne'er shall be; face the perpetual light,
And with him learn
Whate'er the heavens unfold of knowledge infinite."
Each after each then shall we rise,
And follow through the stranger's secret gate,
And we shall ask and hear, beyond surmise,
What glorious life is his, since desolate
We stood about the bed
Where our blind eyes looked down on him as dead.

III
HEIRS OF THE YEARS

EIRS of the years,
How shall we bind our heritage
About our souls so fast
That thieving time, well skilled to dry our tears,
Must leave untouched our riches of the past,
Nor send us dowerless down the road to age?

What dearer wealth had we
Than that our walk fell sometime by the side
Of those rare spirits who no more abide
Where our poor weeks and hours are told?
Forth from the bolder day,
When the gray century was young and free,
One brought a heart that ne'er grew old,
That loved, and knew not fear,
And sped us strengthened on our parted way.
One from the decades near
Garnered all manfulness and cheer,
Plucked from the age that waits unknown
Great hopes and pledges of the things to be.
His should have been the captaincy,
And he the mark
Shining to lead us through the dark
That fronts us now alone.

Nay, must they perish utterly from earth
Because their faces fade from view?
Death—they had told us—is another birth;
If but their death
Might breathe into our lives a fuller breath
Of life, and quicken us anew
With their blent might of age and youth,
Their quiet valor for the truth!

Then, wheresoe'er they are,
They would look down, it may be, on our star,
And feel some fragment of their life lived on,
And know they are not truly gone
From out this world of men.

And, haply, then,
Heirs of the years, we shall have won
Our heritage from loss,
Our gold from all the dimness of the dross.