Friend of an art that is the whole world's friend,
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A whole world brings its laurels and its tears,
And love amazing—love, the busy years,
Inured to the long loss, that none may mend,
Of the diurnal multitudinous dead,
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Pause but how seldom from their tasks to bring
Or cold achievement seated on a throne,
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Wearing the golden armour of its fame,
Frohman, some nobler thing
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We mourn the loss of, mourning thus for you,
Than any deed or any power to do,
Till that last moment of your going hence,
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With those strange words so simply on your tongue,
Words that affirmed beyond all powers of song
O in a book 'twere wisdom easy said,
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Or in some poplar-whispering academe,
Where all man's doings turn into a dream—
"A beautiful adventure"—to be dead;
Or, in long pauses of one's dying breath,
To turn some splendid compliment to death.
But you no leisure had, or warning given,
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The stable world yawned to an instant grave;
You, looking on the gulf that hell had riven,
First thought of little frightened lives to save,
Then on the opening doors your quiet gaze
You turned, and, like a player, took your call.
Ah! he who said "the readiness is all,"
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In all his tale of man's heroic breath,
Hath no such readiness as this to tell
"The beautiful adventure!"—to take leave
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Like that!—we grieve, yet cannot grieve
For that poised soul, who, through the common ways
Of the world's business, carried all his days
That thought eternal, ready all the while
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To greet the mystic summons with a smile.
And you, O world that mourns him, bethink, too,
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That he who left that challenge there for you
To make a bright beginning of the end,
Was neither priest nor poet—but the friend
Of player-folk, of many theatres lord,
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A play-house man, of piety abhorred.