As we the withered ferns
      By the roadway lying,
     Time, the jester, spurns
      All our prayers and prying —
      All our tears and sighing,
     Sorrow, change, and woe —
      All our where-and-whying
     For friends that come and go.

     Life awakes and burns,
      Age and death defying,
     Till at last it learns
      All but Love is dying;
      Love's the trade we're plying,
     God has willed it so;
      Shrouds are what we're buying
     For friends that come and go.

     Man forever yearns
      For the thing that's flying.
     Everywhere he turns,
      Men to dust are drying, —
      Dust that wanders, eying
     (With eyes that hardly glow)
      New faces, dimly spying
     For friends that come and go.

         ENVOY

     And thus we all are nighing
      The truth we fear to know:
     Death will end our crying
      For friends that come and go.

     Up from the street and the crowds that went,
      Morning and midnight, to and fro,
     Still was the room where his days he spent,
      And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow.

     Year after year, with his dream shut fast,
      He suffered and strove till his eyes were dim,
     For the love that his brushes had earned at last, —
      And the whole world rang with the praise of him.

     But he cloaked his triumph, and searched, instead,
      Till his cheeks were sere and his hairs were gray.
     "There are women enough, God knows," he said. . . .
      "There are stars enough — when the sun's away."

     Then he went back to the same still room
      That had held his dream in the long ago,
     When he buried his days in a nameless tomb,
      And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow.

     And a passionate humor seized him there —
      Seized him and held him until there grew
     Like life on his canvas, glowing and fair,
      A perilous face — and an angel's, too.

     Angel and maiden, and all in one, —
      All but the eyes.  — They were there, but yet
     They seemed somehow like a soul half done.
      What was the matter?  Did God forget? . . .

     But he wrought them at last with a skill so sure
      That her eyes were the eyes of a deathless woman, —
     With a gleam of heaven to make them pure,
      And a glimmer of hell to make them human.

     God never forgets.  — And he worships her
      There in that same still room of his,
     For his wife, and his constant arbiter
      Of the world that was and the world that is.

     And he wonders yet what her love could