Chapter III

My friend, thus widow’d, caused that our school’s head,
Already nodding o’er his noonday pipe,
Should beck at sever’d dreams with one nod more,
And so consent to our dreams.
Room-mates made,
We slamm’d his door and woke him; not ourselves.
Our dreamland lasted, that is, when we two
Were by ourselves. When more surrounded us—
You know boy-friends are shy: is it a trait,
Their shielding of their hearts, that fits them thus
For life-tilts of their manhood?—How we two
Would rasp each other when the world look’d on!
In truth, each seem’d to wear his nature’s coat
The soft side inward, comforting himself,
And turn the rough side only toward the world.
If strangers chafed against it, yet oneself
And friend were saved this.

When thus Elbert’s cloak
Was mine, and mine was his, and both held both,
No proof could have convinced me in those days
His peer had ever liv’d. What seem’d in him
So mild and beautiful, was more than marks
Mere difference between a porcupine
Provok’d and peaceable. The kind was new;
Not human, so angelic. Ay, that soul,
As pure as loving, and as fine as frank,
I half believe to-day, as I did then,
Stood strange amid his comrades of the play
As dogwood, wedded to the skies of spring,
White in a wilderness of wintry pines.
Ah me, could all find all on earth so dear,
Christ’s work were common. I had died for him.
In fact, to shield the rogue, I just escap’d
That very fate a score of times or more,
Bluft, bruis’d, and battling for him on the green.