Page:Songs from the Southern Seas and Other Poems (1873).djvu/59

Rh But on a man grown weirdly old, whose face Keeps turning ever to some new-found place That rises up before him like a dream; And not unlike a dreamer does he seem, Who might have slept, unheeding time's sure flow, And woke to find a world he does not know. His long white hair flows o'er a form low bowed By wondrous weight of years: he speaks aloud In garbled Swedish words, with piteous wist, As long-lost objects rise through memory's mist. Again and once again his pace he stays, As crowding images of other days Loom up before him dimly, and he sees A vague, forgotten friendship in the trees That reach their arms in welcome; but agen These olden glimpses vanish, and dark men Are round him, dumb and crouching, and he stands With guttural sentences and upraised hands, That hold a carven case,—but empty now. Which makes more pitiful the aged brow