Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONSTANCY The shadows that companion me From chronicles and poetry More constant and substantial are Than these my men familiar, Who draw with me uncertain breath A little while this side of death; For you, my friend, may fail to keep To-morrow's tryst, so darkly deep The motions mutable that give To flesh its brief prerogative, And in the pleasant hours we make Together for devotion's sake, Always the testament I see That is our twin mortality. But those from the recorded page Keep an eternal pilgrimage. They stedfastly inhabit here With no mortality to fear, And my communion with them Ails not in the mind's stratagem Against the sudden blow, the date That once must fall unfortunate. They fret not nor persuade, and when These graduates I entertain, I grieve not that I too must fall As you, my friend, to funeral, But rather find example there POEMS That, when my boughs of time are bare, And nothing more the body's chance Governs my careful circumstance, I shall, upon that later birth, Walk in immortal fields of earth. SOUTHAMPTON BELLS Long ago some builder thrust Heavenward in Southampton town His spire and beamed his bells, Largely conceiving from the dust That pinnacle for ringing down Orisons and Noels. In his imagination rang, Through generations challenging His peal on simple men, Who, as. the heart within him sang, In daily townfaring should sing By year and year again. Now often to their ringing go The bellmen with lean Time at heel, Intent on daily cares; The bells ring high, the bells ring low, The ringers ring the builder's peal Of tidings unawares. And all the bells might well be dumb For any quickening, in the street Of customary ears; And so at last proud builders come POEMS With dreams and virtues to defeat Among the...