Wallace Ferguson by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

There at Geneva where Mt. Blanc floated above / The wine-hued lake like a cloud, when a breeze was blown / Out of an empty sky of blue, and the roaring Rhone / Hurried under the bridge through chasms of rock;

And the music along the cafés was part of the splendor / Of dancing water under a torrent of light;

And the purer part of the genius of Jean Rousseau / Was the silent music of all we saw or heard --

There at Geneva, I say, was the rapture less / Because I could not link myself with the I of yore, / When twenty years before I wandered about Spoon River?

Nor remember what I was nor what I felt?

We live in the hour all free of the hours gone by.

Therefore, O soul, if you lose yourself in death, / And wake in some Geneva by some Mt. Blanc, / What do you care if you know not yourself as the you / Who lived and loved in a little corner of earth / Known as Spoon River ages and ages vanished?