Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/132

 We were not quite accoutred for a blast Of any lettered nonchalance like that, And some of us—the five or six of us Who found him out—were singularly struck. But soon there came assurance of his lips, Like phrases out of some sweet instrument Man's hand had never fitted, that he felt "No penitential shame for what had come, No virtuous regret for what had been,— But rather a joy to find it in his life To be an outcast usher of the soul For such as had good courage of the Sun To pattern Love." The Captain had one chair; And on the bottom of it, like a king, For longer time than I dare chronicle, Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized His opportunity. My friends got out, Like brokers out of Arcady; but I— May be for fascination of the thing, Or may be for the larger humor of it— Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung. When they were gone the Captain's tuneful ooze Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled At me and then continued, earnestly: "Your friends have had enough of it; but you, For a motive hardly vindicated yet By prudence or by conscience, have remained; And that is very good, for I have things To tell you : things that are not words alone Which are the ghosts of things but something firmer. "First, would I have you know, for every gift Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be— Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind We feel for what we take, the larger kind We feel for what we give. Once we have learned