Geist's Grave by Matthew Arnold

Four years! -- and didst thou stay above / The ground, which hides thee now, but four?

And all that life, and all that love, / Were crowded, Geist! into no more?

Only four years those winning ways, / Which make me for thy presence yearn, / Call'd us to pet thee or to praise, / Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul, / Had they indeed no longer span, / To run their course, and reach their goal, / And read their homily to man?

That liquid, melancholy eye, / From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs / Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry,

The sense of tears in mortal things --

That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled / By spirits gloriously gay, / And temper of heroic mould --

What, was four years their whole short day?

Yes, only four! -- and not the course / Of all the centuries yet to come, / And not the infinite resource / Of Nature, with her countless sum / Of figures, with her fullness vast / Of new creation evermore, / Can ever quite repeat the past, / Or just thy little self restore.

Stern law of every mortal lot!

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, / And builds himself I know not what / Of second life I know not where.

But thou, when struck thine hour to go, / On us, who stood despondent by, / A meek last glance of love didst throw, / And humbly lay thee down to die.

Yet would we keep thee in our heart --

Would fix our favourite on the scene, / Nor let thee utterly depart / And be as if thou ne'er hadst been.

And so there rise these lines of verse / On lips that rarely form them now; / While to each other we rehearse: / Such ways, such arts, such looks hadst thou!

We stroke thy broad brown paws again, / We bid thee to thy vacant chair, / We greet thee by the window-pane, / We hear thy scuffle on the stair.

We see the flaps of thy large ears / Quick raised to ask which way we go; / Crossing the frozen lake, appears / Thy small black figure on the snow!

Nor to us only art thou dear / Who mourn thee in thine English home; / Thou hast thine absent master's tear, / Dropt by the far Australian foam.

Thy memory lasts both here and there, / And thou shall live as long as we.

And after that -- thou dost not care!