The Argosy — page 255: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

UNRECONCILED. O Lp friend, true friend! a thousand leagues apart Walk we at last, who walked together long : with my quiet life, and vexed, unquiet heart ; Thou with thy shattered dreams, and sudden sense of wrong. A thousand leagues—ay, and a thousand more ! No reckoning, no measurement, nor line, No stretch of countless miles on any sea or shore Can span the desert breadth between thy life and mine. It is not that thy home is where the hills Wear on their shining slopes a flush of spring ; Where the young cresses edge the May-day’s leaping rills, And ’round the valley homes the robins nest and sing ; While mine 1s where the summer’s fiercest beam Burns hot across the river and the plain ; Where snowy sails all day along the waters gleam ; Where all day sweeps the breeze o’er miles of yellowing grain. It is not that the blue sea’s boundlessness Hath rolled between, and swept me from mine own: It was a blacker surge, more wild and pitiless, That flung me wrecked on this strange tropic shore alone. For thee to-day the pines’ low music moans, The maples weave their lyrics on the hills ; Faint on my hearing float the thousand blended tones Of tropic trees and birds, whose song the distance fills. Day after day thine ever-restless feet Tread the old paths where mine are hushed for aye ; I make new footprints down one quiet, crumbling street, At war with all its hush, and with my destiny. Severed so wide by mount, and wave, and plain, And by a sea whose waste no chart can show ! Oh, my once darling ! we have worn many a chain ; But of dividing chains how could Love dream or know ? COPMICMOOKS CO