Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/166

 "So you have come to hear the old man read To you from his last will and testament: Well, it will not be long not very long So listen." He brought out from underneath His pillow a new manuscript, and said, "You have done well to come and hear me read My testament. There are men in the world Who say of me, if they remember me, That I am poor;—and I believe the ways Of certain men who never find things out Are stranger than the way Lord Bacon wrote Leviticus, and Faust." He fixed his eyes Abstractedly on something far from us, And with a look that I remembered well Gazed hard the while we waited. But at length He found himself and soon began to chant, With a fitful shift at thin sonorousness The jocund instrument; and had he been Definitively parceling to us All Kimberley and half of Ballarat, The lordly quaver of his poor old words Could not have been the more magniloquent. No promise of dead carbon or of gold, However, flashed in ambush to corrupt us : "I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast, Sage-errant, favored of the Mysteries, And self-reputed humorist at large, Do now, confessed of my world-worshiping, Time-questioning, sun-fearing, and heart-yielding, Approve and unreservedly devise To you and your assigns for evermore, God's universe and yours. If I had won What first I sought, I might have made you beam By giving less ; but now I make you laugh