How placidly this silent river rolls <br />Under the midnight stars before our feet, <br />While we chant music of dead poets' souls <br />The treasury of Time has made so sweet. <br />This is my Charles, O Friend! the loving nurse <br />Of a boy's heart who dreamed life would be worse <br />Than death, if he gave not in future years <br />Some few more songs to those this river bears. <br />Ah, here we sit, the boy's heart grown to man's --- <br />Westward from Cambridge, hid among the hills, <br />Breaks forth its source no wider than your <br />hands; --- <br />How like our own experience it fills <br />Here at this point its widening banks, as we <br />Grow out to fill our duties, to the sea! <br />Here all the night is on us with its stars; <br />The pregnant silence tapers to a sound; <br />The river's crossed with pulsing silver bars <br />The distant lights reflect; upon this mound <br />We sit through this eternal hour of time <br />And read the book our souls have writ in rhyme: <br />Youth's golden chapters done in poetry --- <br />But where this river here runs on to sea <br />By muddy flats, stone walls, and wharves that <br />close <br />The glad impulsive welcome of its home, <br />So henceforth shall Time write our acts in prose; <br />Yea, and when God adds <br />Finis <br />to the tome, <br />This Dedicatory night our souls will blend, <br />To show, though life, true Friendship cannot <br />end.<br /><br />William Stanley Braithwaite<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-arthur-upson/
