Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/50

 Surviving, somehow.” And all this to me

Was not quite so irrelevant as to others

It may at first appear; for the same thought

Pursued me always in those other days

When I had harmonized ingeniously

Some brief and unoffending cerebration

Which, had it been one, would have been a song.

To some persuasion sharper than advice

I must have yielded slowly and at last

Let fall my lyre into the fearsome well

Of truth, hearing no protest from below;

Thereby surviving bitterness to indite

This tale of one who foundered in a slough

More fearsome, and lost there a mightier lyre.

He was not humble, this Fernando Nash;

Yet while he may have ministered on occasion