Names Upon a Stone

Across bleak widths of broken sea

A fierce north-easter breaks,

And makes a thunder on the lea —

A whiteness of the lakes.

Here, while beyond the rainy stream

The wild winds sobbing blow,

I see the river of my dream

Four wasted years ago.

Narrara of the waterfalls,

The darling of the hills,

Whose home is under mountain walls

By many-luted rills!

Her bright green nooks and channels cool

I never more may see;

But, ah! the Past was beautiful —

The sights that used to be.

There was a rock-pool in a glen

Beyond Narrara's sands;

The mountains shut it in from men

In flowerful fairy lands;

But once we found its dwelling-place —

The lovely and the lone —

And, in a dream, I stooped to trace

Our names upon a stone.

Above us, where the star-like moss

Shone on the wet, green wall

That spanned the straitened stream across,

We saw the waterfall —

A silver singer far away,

By folded hills and hoar;

Its voice is in the woods to-day —

A voice I hear no more.

I wonder if the leaves that screen

The rock-pool of the past

Are yet as soft and cool and green

As when we saw them last!

I wonder if that tender thing,

The moss, has overgrown

The letters by the limpid spring —

Our names upon the stone!

Across the face of scenes we know

There may have come a change —

The places seen four years ago

Perhaps would now look strange.

To you, indeed, they cannot be

What haply once they were:

A friend beloved by you and me

No more will greet us there.

Because I know the filial grief

That shrinks beneath the touch —

The noble love whose words are brief —

I will not say too much;

But often when the night-winds strike

Across the sighing rills,

I think of him whose life was like

The rock-pool's in the hills.

A beauty like the light of song

Is in my dreams, that show

The grand old man who lived so long

As spotless as the snow.

A fitting garland for the dead

I cannot compass yet;

But many things he did and said

I never will forget.

In dells where once we used to rove

The slow, sad water grieves;

And ever comes from glimmering grove

The liturgy of leaves.

But time and toil have marked my face,

My heart has older grown

Since, in the woods, I stooped to trace

Our names upon the stone.