Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/100

 92

��INTRODUCTION

��US with him ; Edwin drove. After the former had bought some things there, we went to Marlborough and saw those fine views which I have described as well as I could before."

Here the journal abruptly ended, not to be resumed for several years.

One other carmen amoebaeimi, belonging to the same year 185 1, deserves to be preserved here for the sake of Mr. Randall's part in it. With much diffidence, I brought to him the first of the two following stanzas. He smiled kindly at the poor little thing, took a pencil, and wrote the second stanza offhand.

I love to stand at eve beside the shore,

And mark the billows as they idly play ; They sport a moment and are seen no more.

Yet, as they go, they sadly seem to say : " Our little space of life is quickly o'er,

We have our hour, and then we melt away."

But love sincere can never know decay.

Yet when, from false, true love I fain would tell.

The task seems hard, tinsel so gay appears ; Lo, day by day that which I loved full well

Melts from my view, and leaves me nought but tears. Then, Truth, be thou my aid, these doubts dispel —

If thou with Love unite, farewell all fears !

This bond shall last, not limited by years.

That first visit of a week at Stow, in May, 1851, was a great event in my boyhood. It was the definite beginning of a friendship which lasted, without even a transient cloud, for more than forty years — a close and intimate com- panionship to which I owed much of the best happiness and strongest intellectual stimulus of my early life. For

�� �