IV - A LETTER

Dear boy, what can this stranger mean to you,

Blown to your country by unbridled chance?

That he should drink the morn's first cup of dew

Fresh from the spring, and quicken that grave glance

Wherein as rising tides on hazy shores

Rise the new flames and colours of romance?

Ah, wise and young, the world shall use your youth

And fling you shorn of beauty to despair,

The sum of all that fascinating truth

That you have gleaned, hands tangled in brown hair,

Eyes straining into contemplative fires,—

This truth shall not seem truth when trees are bare.

The hunger of the soul, the watcher left

To brood the nearness of his own decay,

Dully remarking the slow shameless theft

Of the old holiness from day to day,

How youth grows tarnished, wisdom changes false,—

Till one bends near to steal your life away.

Yet who am I to turn aside the hand

Outstretched so friendly and so humbly proud,

Heaped up with beauty from the sunrise land

Of hearts adventurous and heads unbowed?

Only, look not at me with changing eyes

When we must separate amid the crowd.