Words remain—not only Porter’s words on Emerson, but also Emerson’s words on Porter. Between 1841 and 1848, George Emerson kept a series of diaries, which are now part of the George B. Emerson Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. George S.’s words bring Porter to life during his adolescent years away from Niagara Falls and fill a gap in biographical accounts of this Civil War hero. These manuscripts, alongside extant pieces of Porter’s juvenalia held at the Harvard University Archives, create a biographical and cultural portrait of the life of this local legend, a military hero who was also, or first, a poet, and who came of age amid the vibrant literary atmosphere of Harvard in the 1840s. Porter was of that generation of upper class young men who would be called upon to lead regiments in the Civil War, but twenty years earlier, he was an undergraduate, searching for his path in life. At Harvard he would encounter texts and people who would shape his experiences and contribute to his character. Here he forged deep friendships, began to formulate opinions on national culture and politics and listened for his “calling.” His elegy to Emerson marks the maturing of a poetic voice in an era when poetry, among undergraduates, statesmen and military leaders alike, was a primary means of remembrance as well as of connection to others.  

Before the memorials of 1864, another reference to Porter and Emerson appears, this one dated Feb. 10, 1851, when New England essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived in Niagara Falls. Ralph Waldo had come to the Falls ostensibly for two reasons. He had been in Buffalo on one of his many lecture tours and, as a letter to his wife Lidian attests, took the opportunity to sightsee that nearby iconic landscape. Perhaps more importantly, however, he made the journey north with the express purpose of meeting “young Porter (famous as the owner of the Falls,) to whom I had letters.”  It is likely that these letters were an etiquette of nineteenth century social relations, those of introductions between new acquaintances, though one wonders whether the writer of “The American Scholar” and “Nature” would, by 1851, need an introduction. Perhaps the well-known author was bearing letters to Porter on another matter.

Porter was an attentive host, taking Ralph Waldo “in his barouche all around Goat Island,” inviting him to dine at their home on Falls Street with his sister, Elizabeth Porter, and sharing “all the stories.” Though “leading gentleman & great proprietor” of Niagara Falls, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, Porter was also a great reader of literature and a poet. At 24, “young Porter” would likely have held this nineteenth-century intellectual and literary celebrity in high esteem, and no doubt their conversation would have often turned to discussions of an emerging American literature. But the two had something more in common as well. Ralph Waldo writes to Lidian that, “besides a superior young man,” Porter “was a classmate & friend of young George S. Emerson.” To George S., Ralph Waldo Emerson was simply “Uncle Ralph.”

Nearly a decade prior to Ralph Waldo’s visit to Niagara Falls, Peter Augustus Porter and George Samuel Emerson met as undergraduates at Harvard University. An odd twist of fate placed Peter and George in the same graduating class, despite their two-year age difference. Peter was admitted to Harvard in 1842, as a sophomore, at the young age of 15. He was gentle and fair-haired, a likely contrast to George, 6-foot tall by age 17, with “Roman nose,” high forehead and dark complexion. George had originally entered college in 1840 but a condition in his hip sent him home, requiring several months of bed rest. He re-enrolled as a freshman in 1841, so when Peter arrived a year later as a sophomore, they both became members of the class of 1845. His first year back, George felt greater affinity with members of his original class and struggled to connect with the new freshmen. “I never realized ‘till now,” he wrote in his diary, “what it was to be put back a year in college. I see all my old friends sophomores, while I am but a fresh. I am trying to reconcile myself to the change but find it pretty hard. I see little chance of this class turning out as pleasant as the last. There are several boys [. . . ] not large enough to leave their nurseries. Oh dear!! How sorry I am that I did not study up and enter soph.!”  Over the course of his sophomore year, however, George increasingly settled in with his class, forging deep relationships, among them with newly-arrived Peter Porter. By their junior year, through to graduation, George and Peter lived in close proximity in Holworthy Hall on the College Yard, George in Room 4 both years, and Peter in Rooms 16 and 21.

Each descended from a well-educated and civically engaged family. Peter’s father, General Peter Buell Porter, played a vital role on the Niagara Frontier in the War of 1812; helped to determine the international border with Canada; served as Secretary of War under President John Quincy Adams; and, with his brother Augustus Porter, developed Niagara Falls as a center of transportation, commerce and tourism. Where Porter descended from a line of military and government men, George hailed from a family of clergy, educators and writers. George’s father, the well-known George Barrell Emerson of Boston, first cousin to and close friend of Ralph Waldo, was an education reformer. George Barrell opened a private school for young women, held abolitionist views and was an amateur naturalist who wrote studies of Massachusetts’ flora in the service of nature appreciation and preservation. Like others of their generation who descended from families of duty and action, Peter and George were in search of their vocations. Almost immediately, a friendship formed between the two likeminded young men. 

Throughout their college years, George wrote regularly in his diary, detailing life at Harvard. The hardcover volumes are typical of nineteenth century designs with swirling hues of mauve, navy and deep teal. Some are covered with brown paper wrapper, inscribed with “Private Journal,” in which George comments on friends and classmates, news of the day, his insecurities and habits and the usual antics of undergraduates. In the near daily reflections (with some gaps, for which George scolds himself), the writer and his subjects come to life, including “young Porter.” 

It may have been Peter’s interest in literature that first drew him to this relative of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson. Or perhaps George’s reserved nature and quiet intellect was an appealing complement to the extroverted but nonetheless similarly gentle Peter, who took the initiative to forge their friendship. Early in his first term, on Sunday, September 18, 1842, Peter visited George between morning and evening church: “He seems to be a very pleasant sort of fellow,” George recorded in his diary. Less than a week later, George returned the visit: “Called during the eveg on Porter, a fresh soph. I like him quite well and was greatly surprised to hear his age, only 15! I thought him at least 17.” The following morning, George tagged along with Peter to his “Rhetorical Reader [class] in the hall of Hammond, but the room was so cold that [Mr. Adams] dismissed us.” Other visits are spent in the leisure provided by social status, simply doing nothing, what George at times refers to as “loafing.” 

As their friendship grew, so too did their adventures. Peter was drawn to nature. They would visit the Harvard College Observatory, installed in 1839, and take an evening drive along Brookline Road. Water held a particular appeal to Peter, having grown up along the Niagara River, first in Black Rock, and then after 1837 in Niagara Falls when his father moved the family there. George writes of a June day in 1843 when he met up with Peter and another friend and strolled the 1.7 miles from Harvard to Fresh Pond in North Cambridge, where they “enjoyed a long row on the pond and afterwards some ice cream etc. in the hotel.” Years later the writer and Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, reflecting on his own walks with the novelist Henry James to Fresh Pond, would describe it as “a wandering space of woods and water.” Another time, near to graduation, George finds himself on the water with Peter again, this time the Charles River. George’s enthusiasm is evident in the lack of punctuation that would otherwise slow this rush of words: 

In the evening few of us took the boat and rowed down to Boston coming up between 9 and 10 with Peter Porter as coxswain with no moon low tide and bridges to go under, so that we had quite an adventurous time of it. We got off however with only once being caught in the sea weed.

Peter, too, references memories of college days in his 1845 Class Poem, read to his peers on their Class Day, a senior tradition in the weeks leading up to graduation. He hopes that some future day, when these friends meet as men, spouses, fathers and citizens, that they see in each other their younger selves, and know that, however changed, each “Holds the same soul, that sported by his side, In frolic youth, by Charles Silver tide.” 

The playful nature of Peter and George’s outings was present in less adventurous settings too, like this humorous episode in George’s room: 

Porter came in for a few minutes in the eveg. I had a queer kind of visiter [sic] in the shape of the inventor of a new geography who was in quest of Mr. [illegible] and entertained me with a long account of his wants and wishes, throwing off his cloak and sitting down before the fire with his the utmost coolness. Peter Porter, new in the rocking chair, eating pears, desires to be immortalized by having his name entered in this famous volume. He is now immortal in fame.

Such creativity and wit can be seen in a previously unpublished sketch of Peter’s from his undergraduate years.

Other occasions were more somber, as Peter and George faced the early deaths of fellow undergraduates and the loss of Peter’s father. On the evening of Thursday, March 21, 1844, as George was writing a letter to the mother of his friend, Francis Greenwood, about the recent death of Francis’s brother and fellow undergraduate, Charles Greenwood, more bad news arrived. “On coming home,” writes George,

I was shocked to learn that a messenger had just arrived from Niagara, announcing to Porter, that he left his father on the point of death. Porter of course will set out immediately in the probably vain hope of seeing his father once more alive.

Days later, George expresses his friends’ grief as his own: “Many years had elapsed since I had felt any domestic sorrows and now within less than a fortnight Ch. Greenwood has died, Porter has been called away by the death of his father, and Mr. See [another classmate’s father] is almost at the point of death.” It is likely for such capacity for empathy that his obituary in The Christian Examiner would later say of George: “The nearer circle of his intimate friends was every day more and more closely bound to him by the ties of mutual affection and respect. No one was ever loved more sincerely by his friends, or more deserved their love.” Peter was similarly remembered by George Cabot Ward in the Harvard Memorial Biographies: “No one was more valued and cherished.”

With similar natures, Peter and George spent days in leisurely camaraderie, youthful amusement and the comfort of close friendships. They also shared academic interests, and likely spent long evenings discussing literature, philosophy, religion, culture and politics. Peter was said to have held strong convictions “on the great question of human liberty.” George attended abolitionist meetings and was a conscientious thinker, “always bold in supporting what he believed to be right.” The two indeed debated such matters, as George records in his diary: “Spent most of the evening in Porter’s room, discussing the right of one State’s or its members [sic] expression of an unfavorable opinion with regard to another, which Peter denied and Ritchie, Dexter and myself asserted most vigorously for an hour and a half.” In these lines, the values of the later colonel take form. 

Though neither Peter nor George chose the vocation of poet, it was in literature that they nevertheless found their youthful muse. Both were members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, which promoted literary appreciation and study. This shared affinity for literature is evident in public readings each gave during their college years. On Tuesday, October 17, 1843, for instance, George presented on John Milton’s Paradise Lost in the form of “A Metrical Version” of “Milton’s Description of Satan Rising from the Pit of Hell.” On Tuesday, May 6, 1845, Peter gave a “Dissertation” on “The Writings of Charles Dickens.” It was an “excellent” performance, writes George, “much better than I expected, and pleased universally.” 

The two were also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, a prestigious academic society then as now. Peter appears the more disciplined academic, if his Harvard Library charging records are a reliable indication. From 1843-1844, for instance, Peter borrowed 34 volumes on topics such as phrenology, geology and religion. He was an avid reader of literature, from novels and poetry to biographies, and kept up with latest literary periodicals. According to Cabot Ward, Peter’s “reading was thorough and solid, and confined to the best books. He was particularly drawn to the older English classics, whose stately and sober style found a response in his own character. His studies had always a direct reference to a future American literature; and I used to cherish the idea that he was destined to take a high rank among its pioneers.” The English “classics” Peter was drawn to were the Romantics of the preceding decade, for whom nature was restorative to the soul and whose democratic sensibilities elevated ‘the common man’ and the oppressed as fit subjects for poetry and political thought. 

George’s library borrowing record is less consistent than Peter’s during the same period, with only six books having been recorded as borrowed in 1843-44, their late sophomore to junior years. But George had inherited a respect for education, and similarly, his obituarist notes, “Having entered college at an early age, he won the regard of all who knew him by the high qualities he displayed in his intercourse with others and in the pursuit of his studies.”

The month before their graduation, at the Order of Exercises for Class Day, George and Peter were two of only three undergraduates scheduled to perform, positions elected to by their peers. George was nervous for his own performance, however, to the extent that he had little memory of reciting his speech. Throughout Peter’s poem recitation, George was distracted by thoughts of his own failure and unworthiness. Afterward, he pulled Francis Greenwood aside, who assured him of his success. 

Like George’s volumes of diaries, Peter’s Class Poem captures formative moments of their Harvard years, those both newsworthy and those of everyday life among undergraduates. The poem, his ‘juvenalia’ written at age 18, its pages folded, sewn and tied with a thread most likely by Peter’s hand, nevertheless contains in its 535 lines insight and wit rare to youth, qualities developed more fully in his poems written after the 1850s. Both Peter and George were likely inspired in their studies and thinking by the vibrant literary and intellectual culture of Harvard in the early 1840s. They lived and studied among some of the most prominent American writers of early- to mid- nineteenth century. Five short years before their arrival, Ralph Waldo Emerson had delivered “The American Scholar” lecture before the Phi Beta Kappa society, calling forth an American literature by announcing that, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” A year later, in 1838, he gave his divisive “Divinity School Address,” breaking with religious doctrine, as he had with literary tradition. Admonishing adherence to religious rule and ritual, Emerson promoted the role of intuition and experience in faith. He saw nature as divine and thus the world as “the mirror of the soul.” In these speeches were the foundations of literary transcendentalism. For his radical words, Harvard banned Emerson from future speeches at the college. Uncle Ralph, as George affectionately called him, visited George at his boarding house his sophomore year, and the two continued their visits and discussions throughout George’s studies. It is unclear as to whether Peter met Ralph Waldo at this time, but his poetry shares Emerson’s belief in the moral value of nature.

Additionally, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, referred to as “Mr. Fellow” in George’s diaries, was professor of languages and was actively publishing poetry during George and Peter’s time at Harvard.  In 1842, the British novelist Charles Dickens made his widely publicized and generally unhappy travels to America. The resulting travel book, published in November 1842, was all anyone talked about, according to George. Peter may have had the opportunity to have met Dickens in Niagara Falls earlier that year had the famous author not declined Gen. Porter’s invitation to their home . And, in 1843, Margaret Fuller, transcendentalist and close friend to Ralph Waldo Emerson, was the first woman permitted access to the Harvard Library Reading Room. Fuller was researching her own travel book, Summer on the Lakes, which opens with an essay on Niagara Falls. 

It is unquestionable that Peter, if not every Harvard undergraduate, was aware of Fuller’s presence. Peter’s Class Poem recounts memories of the graduating class’ years at Harvard, including that of “Minerva seated in the Olympian Hall”—that is, the then Harvard Library, Gore Hall. Minerva, Roman warrior goddess of art and wisdom, was Fuller’s own metaphor for female creativity and “self-reliance.” She had, as Peter puts it, “seized her lance” and dared triumphantly to enter the hallowed halls of male learning, “That undisturbed for centuries had stood.” He also comments that “Her eyes of indigo, with rapture dance,” suggesting that he was in close proximity to her at some point.  Fuller’s uneasy task, bringing change to centuries of tradition, was not lost on impressionable undergraduates who, in Peter’s words, “Hail the glad advent of the learned maid.” Peter conveys an attitude of respect for this educated woman in an historically all-male institution, a remarkable sensibility in 1843 that conveys much of his character.

More intimate memories are recalled in Peter’s Class Poem, too, such as the closeness of male friendships. Expressions of strong feeling between men were not uncommon in the nineteenth century. The opening lines of the poem express Peter’s feelings for his classmates, tearful parting and the desire to be reunited in the future. Like many a graduation speech, the young poet writes of the mountains and vales of life that have characterized both those days gone by and those yet to come, when “hope shall fire us with a tenfold strength / Whispering that Life has joy as well as pain. / That the sun’s rays do often gladly shoot / Into the dungeons of the deepest vale.” He knows that while “we’ve tarried with youth’s song / Within these walls, the outward throng / In billowy surge hath swept along”—that the world has changed, as have they. He recalls the pleasures of the past four years, the activity and antics of undergraduate life, which may have, for some, included a night or two of drink: 

Before us too, our social pleasures pass

The mellowed figures of the magic glass.

The fire side circle, and the summer throng,

The noisy laughter, and the noisier song.

Still, they “must forward range,” to “yield a place” to others, and to make their own ways in the world. Soon, they would leave each other, and many among this close circle felt heavy of heart.

At their Commencement from Harvard on August 27, 1845, Peter and George processed with fellow graduates at 10 o’clock in the morning from the library in Gore Hall to the First Parish Church. There, the young men presented their topics of study. Peter, placing in the top half of the class in Greek and in Political Economy, was the 28th graduate to perform, with a dissertation on “The Late Thomas Hood,” a well-known English Romantic poet and humorist who died in early May that year.  George had impressively attained ‘High distinction’ in the Departments of Greek, Rhetoric, Physics, Philosophy, Political Economy and History. He was listed as number 32 in order of performance, and had planned to read “An English Oration” on “Cicero, a Philosopher,” but as one alumnus curiously recounts in his memoirs, “The 2d English oration, by Emerson, was omitted on account of his ill health.” The degree of A.B. (Latin, “artium baccalaureus”), or Bachelor of Arts, was then conferred on 61 graduates, including Peter Augustus Porter and George Samuel Emerson.

The march of life soon separated Peter and George, taking them along different paths. The uncertainty of how to make their own way in the world often brought anxiety to upper class young men of their generation. And no wonder, given the pressures put upon them. In an article titled “A worthy Son of an honored Father,” published in The Spirit of the Times the month after their graduation, those who knew Gen. Porter questioned whether Peter would live up to his family name and “rise to the very hightest honors his country has it in her power to bestow.” Later that fall, a letter between classmates Thomas Russell and Charles Henry Glover details a number of the graduates’ activities in December of that year, several of whom pursued the “noble callings” of theology, law and medicine. George, identified as ‘G.S.E.’ in the letter, is a source of information, but he is not otherwise discussed. Peter is given comic and lofty portrayal: “Peter is probably writing sonnets to Niagara, and wasting the night in watching the Moon, or out watching the Bear.” 

By 1846, however, with a letter of introduction to U.S. diplomats from former president John Quincy Adams, Peter left for England before heading to Germany to study at the University of Heidelberg and then on to universities in Berlin and Breslau. He was now on the path his family legacy had carved out, even if he was as yet uncertain of his calling. “My call has not come: I must bide my time;” Cabot Ward quotes in Porter’s memorial biography; “I can wait, but I cannot give myself, for the sake of occupation or success, to that which my heart does not tell me I am fitted for. I am conscious of the possession of all my faculties in their prime. Whatever I could have been I still could be; but I cannot choose, I must be chosen.” He would go on to study law, would serve in the New York State Assembly and volunteer to raise and lead a regiment in the Civil War. His poetry would remain a way to connect with others, such as entertaining friends at the Century Club. 

George’s heart was fitted for the church. In February 1846, he had departed for Cuba, but returned home in June. That September he began study and a proctorship at Harvard Divinity School. His close friend Francis Greenwood did the same, and the two shared their days together.  Though happy and feeling that he was pursuing a ‘useful’ path, he “longed for the crowd of friends who once surrounded” them. In 1847, after a short illness, Greenwood unexpectedly passed away, leaving George deep in grief. He felt, he writes, “almost as if the better half of myself were gone.” In May of that year, he composed “A Sketch of the Life of Francis William Greenwood,” a lengthy memorial in The Monthly Religious Magazine, the only work he would publish.He was now questioning his faith and so left his studies.

In July 1847, George departed for Europe and spent time with other Harvard classmates in Paris, learning French, before traveling on to Italy. His interest in languages helped to preoccupy him. After some practice with Italian, he set off for Heidelberg to study German, and perhaps to meet up with Peter. By October of the following year, however, George increasingly felt alone, and, with seasickness during his 10-day journey home, as friend Frederic Cunningham wrote in the Harvard Class Book for 1845, was “led through an intense conviction of physical, intellectual, & even moral unworthiness,” which he could not escape. 

On December 21, 1848, the Local Intelligence section of The Boston Daily Advertiser reported the news of George’s suicide two days earlier. On the day of his death, Cunningham recounts, George “had called to see his physician seven times, unsuccessfully, the last at about two o’clock.” In the discourse of the nineteenth century, Cunningham would refer to George’s mental ‘disease’ or ‘malady’ and even ‘insanity,’ but both he and the writer of George’s obituary acknowledge the depth of his despair over the death of Francis Greenwood, his loss of enthusiasm for his faith and studies, his loneliness and feelings of unworthiness.

It is not certain when Peter heard of his friend’s tragic death, but given the emotional register of his elegy, it was likely soon after George’s suicide. Others of Porter’s poems composed after his undergraduate years demonstrate his vast reading, complex thinking, wit and depth of feeling, but his elegy for George S. Emerson conveys something more in its expression of personal grief. George’s death was certainly not Peter’s first experience with loss, nor would it be his last, but it was the one he memorialized. As Cozzens remarked in the memorial address to The Century Club, the elegy “is full of the tenderest pathos, and might properly be quoted here, if it did not too painfully recall the writer.” Like the other memorials to Porter, Cozzens’ suggests the similarity in the characters of Porter and Emerson, even as the latter is forgotten so that the former might be recalled.

It is likely that the writers of Porter’s memorials were familiar with the elegiac poem as conventionally self-referential, lamenting not only the loss of a beloved friend and poet but also reflecting on the writer’s own mortality and fame. As mentioned above, however, the elegy to George was not the first Porter would write in this genre. In February 1845, he reportedly penned his own elegy in “Come Nearer to me, Sister.” In both this elegy and in that for George, Porter is influenced by both the British Romantics and the American transcendentalists of his own era. “Come Nearer to me, Sister” links nature to a sense of the divine, as do the writers he admires, but here the connection is a facile one:

I thought to have wrought earnestly, while life’s short hours flew by-

To have bid man’s homeward tendencies blaze upward to the sky-

To have seen the blessings of this world exalt and bless mankind-

Go rejoicing with the sunbeam and journeying on the wind.

The poem sentimentalizes his own death but cannot capture fully the emotion of those who will be left behind. In the elegiac tradition, the poem might be said to be more concerned with his own immortality in the affections and thoughts of others.

Porter’s use of the apostrophe, a poetic address to one absent or dead, is more direct than the elegies that precede him. The device attempts to render Emerson present, thereby making the speech act intimate. In the poem, Porter’s despair is palpable as he tries to make impossible sense of this loss, what Ralph Waldo Emerson elsewhere called the “awful calamity” and “the dreadful tale of George S.E.s death.” Ralph Waldo’s visit with Porter in Feb. 1851 took place just two short years after George’s suicide. It is likely they reminisced about this beloved “nephew” and close companion. In Porter’s elegy, we come to feel intimately the speaker’s sorrow, his compassion for his lost friend and his desire that he be honored and remembered.

If in imagining his own death in 1845 Porter believed he would have understood God’s intent, in George’s suicide he cannot conceive of such purpose. His reference to the divine nevertheless transcends time and place so that in this “now” their spirits are one: “And now there comes that phantom of the past, / Rousing my soul with its elastic prime.” Porter is not limited by the physical world but is unified with George in spirit and soul, a companion in death as in life. For anyone who has lost someone too young, too soon, the memories indeed live on. Is it likely Peter thought often of George, and it is fitting that his elegy had been seen by others as a tribute to the author himself. It is through George S. Emerson that a more vivid picture of Col. Peter A. Porter emerges.

Dr. Jamie Carr is an associate professor of English at Niagara University. She is currently at work on a book on famous writers who visited and wrote about Niagara Falls, which is under advance contract with SUNY Press.

The author would like to express her appreciation to William James Griffing for permission to quote the 1845 Thomas Russell letter.

I met our friends upon a foreign shore,
     And asked of thee; they told me thou wert dead!
My lips repeat, “He is no more,— no more” ;
     ‘T was all I said.

Yet sank my spirit in me, and there went
     A strange confusion o’er my saddened brow,
I could not pierce God’s infinite intent;
     I cannot now.

I only know that He who in thy birth
     Had shadowed forth Himself, though faint and dim,
Decreed how long thou shouldst remain on earth,
     How long with Him.

And now there comes that phantom of the past,
     Rousing my soul with its elastic prime:
I see thee still as when I saw thee last,—
     In that glad time,—

Radiant in beauty of the form and mind,
     And young renown of academic strife,
Joy lay around, a stainless life behind,
     Before thee, life;

A high-priest standing in the temple’s space
     Ere yet the sacrificial rites begin,
A giant waiting for the glorious race
     He is to win.

We thought eternal tablets would record
     Thy name with theirs who, since the world began,
With an immortal strength, and toil and word,
     Have wrought for man.

We thought—alas! what thought we not of good,
     Of all that hope or promise e’er begat;
Of all save early doom—O friend! how could
     We think of that?

We could not see the shadows close thee round;
     We could not know prophetic cypress shed
Funereal perfume for the wreath that bound
     “So dear a head.” 

We could not think the light that from afar
     We deemed prelusive of the coming sun
Was but the parting radiance of his car,
     When day is done.

But now I know too well a light’s withdrawn
     That made this gloomy earth for me more fair;
A perfume’s fled and gentle influence gone
     That soothed my care.

And yet not wholly gone: through life’s sad vale
     Thy soul—now prompting to resemble thee,
And now in sad monition when I fail—
     Shall walk with me.

With me? O yes! but not with me alone;
     For in the fair companionship of youth,
Others than I have fondly felt and known
     Thy love and truth;

Have drunk at learning’s fount with thee, and seen
     How Doubt’s dark depths and Thought’s wild surge above
Thy mild-eyed faith, so pure and so serene,
     Soared like a dove.

Enough: what might have been is not; no more     Shall I return thy grasp, and seek thy glance:Perchance we meet on heaven’s eternal shore;     Alas! perchance!