| OUTSIDE hove Shasta, snowy height on height, | |
| A glory; but a negligible sight, | |
| For you had often seen a mountain-peak | |
| But not my paper. So we came to speak... | |
| |
| A smoke, a smile,—a good way to commence | 5 |
| The comfortable exchange of difference! | |
| You a young engineer, five feet eleven, | |
| Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven, | |
| Liking a road-bed newly built and clean, | |
| Your fingers hot to cut away the green | 10 |
| Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track | |
| The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,— | |
| And I a poet, wistful of my betters, | |
| Reading George Meredith's high-hearted letters, | |
| Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech | 15 |
| Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each | |
| Absorbing to himself—as I to me | |
| And you to you—a glad identity! | |
| |
| After a time, when others went away, | |
| A curious kinship made us choose to stay, | 20 |
| Which I could tell you now; but at the time | |
| You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme, | |
| Until we found that we were college men | |
| And smoked more easily and smiled again; | |
| And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still: | 25 |
| "I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill | |
| At Berkeley!" With your happy Grecian head | |
| Upraised, "I never saw the place," you said— | |
| "Once I was free of class, I always went | |
| Out to the field." | 30 |
| |
| Young engineer, you meant | |
| As fair a tribute to the better part | |
| As ever I did. Beauty of the heart | |
| Is evident in temples. But it breathes | |
| Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths, | 35 |
| Which are the lovelier because they die. | |
| You are a poet quite as much as I, | |
| Though differences appear in what we do, | |
| And I an athlete quite as much as you. | |
| Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile | 40 |
| And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile. | |
| Who knows but we shall look again and find | |
| The circus-man and drummer, not behind | |
| But leading in our visible estate— | |
| As discus-thrower and as laureate? | 45 |
