  When all his days were ended and the time Had come when he should ease his troubled breath, And leave this world and all its joy and woe; Tama the wise lay pondering on his bed, Thinking of the silences to be; And weary of the burden of his age He breathed him hard and fained to be at rest. Then came there to him Augur the patriarch, Who held the office of the national priest, And kept the holy temple lamps alit, And made himself a power athwart the land, Then spake old Tama:— “Shame not the Eternal With mouth of empty words of what thou knowest No more than do the hollow winds that blow “O Augur, knowest thou not me, Tama of old time, That I am not the man to act the dupe; Or dost thou think that lying on my bed In mine old age, like some slow-crumbling tree, That I may chance grow credulous like a child Or woman or weakling, and at fear of death “O Augur, from the cradle to the tomb, All things about us teach us we must pass. The joys we knew as children, the long years, That slowly closed about us like a prison, The summer grasses underneath our feet, The winter snows, the joyous spring-tide hours, All spake the awful future in my heart, And whispered, all is passing, thou must go, Even as these: and I have felt a joy, Even as a child, in all this mighty world, And the weird, awful mystery it held; And taught me softly I were like the trees And winds and flowers that come a season and die. “O Augur, dost thou not know I am old, With wrinkled winter writ about my face, A trembling at the fingers and the knees, Like some old, cunning instrument whose force Is rattled out, fit only to be stored Within the dusty chambers of the past, Where wintry key-hole moanings tune in vain The coffined mem’ries from their dusty sleep, Where chance a heatless ray may fall at morn, Nor startle the wainscot-gnawing, nor the dull, Eternal presence of that lifeless past. “O Augur, this is death, and I am fain For the long slumber ’neath the greening grass. For as a winter-brook beneath its ice, My channel of life is shrunken low in me, And life’s great voices dwindle and sink afar; And time’s musician charms mine ears in vain: For like some tree amid the forest wide, “Nor, Augur, am I sad, nor hold desire To lengthen out my days beyond their time; For when the timbers of the house are rotten The roof-tree sinks, and the old walls refuse To keep the winters out; then comes the time When the householder packs his goods to go. So I will wend me where I know me not, But down the twilight roads of easeful death, Perchance an inn where I may find me rest. “Yea, Augur, I had sadness in my days, “And I must say, O Augur, even now, When I lie here upon this edge of life, That slopes far downward to the soundless dark, That I here feel me even as when a child I wandered on the sunny slopes of morn, And heard the elfin horns of faery blown About the confines of my vision’s scope. For I hold happiness for the crumbling trunk, |
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