Classic Poem

A GAIN ye come, again ye throng around me,
Dim, shadowy beings of my boyhood's dream!
Still shall I bless, as then, your spell that bound me?
Still bend to mists and vapors as ye seem?
Nearer ye come: I yield me as ye found me
In youth, your worshipper; and as the stream
Of air that folds you in its magic wreaths,
Flows by my lips, youth's joy my bosom breathes.

Lost forms and loved ones ye are with you bringing,
And dearest images of happier days,
First-love and friendship in your path upspringing,
Like old tradition's half-remembered lays,
And long-slept sorrows waked, whose dirge-like singing
Recalls my life's strange labyrinthine maze,
And names the heart-mourned many a stern doom,
Ere their year's summer, summoned to the tomb.

They hear not these my last songs, they whose greeting
Gladdened my first; my spring-time friends have gone,
And gone, fast journeying from that place of meeting,
The echoes of their welcome, one by one.
Though stranger crowds, my listeners since, are beating
Time to my music, their applauding tone
More grieves than glads me, while the tried and true,
If yet on earth, are wandering far and few.

A longing long unfelt, a deep-drawn sighing
For the far Spirit-World o'erpowers me now;
My song's faint voice sinks fainter, like the dying
Tones of the wind-harp swinging from the bough,
And my changed heart throbs warm, no more denying
Tears to my eyes, or sadness to my brow:
The near afar off seems, the distant nigh,
The now a dream, the past reality.