Across bleak widths of broken sea
  A fierce north-easter breaks,
And makes a thunder on the lea —
  A whiteness of the lakes.
Here, while beyond the rainy stream
  The wild winds sobbing blow,
I see the river of my dream
  Four wasted years ago.

Narrara of the waterfalls,
  The darling of the hills,
Whose home is under mountain walls
  By many-luted rills!
Her bright green nooks and channels cool
  I never more may see;
But, ah! the Past was beautiful —
  The sights that used to be.

There was a rock-pool in a glen
  Beyond Narrara's sands;
The mountains shut it in from men
  In flowerful fairy lands;
But once we found its dwelling-place —
  The lovely and the lone —
And, in a dream, I stooped to trace
  Our names upon a stone.

Above us, where the star-like moss
  Shone on the wet, green wall
That spanned the straitened stream across,
  We saw the waterfall —
A silver singer far away,
  By folded hills and hoar;
Its voice is in the woods to-day —
  A voice I hear no more.

I wonder if the leaves that screen
  The rock-pool of the past
Are yet as soft and cool and green
  As when we saw them last!
I wonder if that tender thing,
  The moss, has overgrown
The letters by the limpid spring —
  Our names upon the stone!

Across the face of scenes we know
  There may have come a change —
The places seen four years ago
  Perhaps would now look strange.
To you, indeed, they cannot be
  What haply once they were:
A friend beloved by you and me
  No more will greet us there.

Because I know the filial grief
  That shrinks beneath the touch —
The noble love whose words are brief —
  I will not say too much;
But often when the night-winds strike
  Across the sighing rills,
I think of him whose life was like
  The rock-pool's in the hills.

A beauty like the light of song
  Is in my dreams, that show
The grand old man who lived so long
  As spotless as the snow.
A fitting garland for the dead
  I cannot compass yet;
But many things he did and said
  I never will forget.

In dells where once we used to rove
  The slow, sad water grieves;
And ever comes from glimmering grove
  The liturgy of leaves.
But time and toil have marked my face,
  My heart has older grown
Since, in the woods, I stooped to trace
  Our names upon the stone.