Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/141

 Not qualified by those amenities, And I should have to search the matter down; For I was young, and I was very keen. So I began to smoke a bad cigar That Plunket, in his love, had given me The night before; and as I smoked I watched The flying mirrors for a mile or so, Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint, They gave me of the woodland over west, A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail, With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky; And yawning out of that I set myself To face again the loud monotonous ride That lay before me like a vista drawn Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.

that ride had an end, as all rides have; And the days coming after took the road That all days take, though never one of them Went by but I got some good thought of it For Captain Craig. Not that I pitied him, Or nursed a mordant hunger for his presence; But what I thought (what Killigrew still thinks) An irremediable cheerfulness Was in him and about the name of him, And I fancy that it may be most of all For cheer in them that I have saved his letters. I like to think of him, and how he looked— Or should have looked—in his renewed estate, Composing them. They may be dreariness Unspeakable to you that never saw The Captain; but to five or six of us