Snapped his fiddle-string,
And hobbled from _The Mermaid_
Sulky as a king.

Only from the darkness now, steals the strain we knew:
No one even knows his grave!
Only here and there a stave,
Out of all his hedge-row flock, be-drips the may with dew.
And I know not what wild bird
Carried us his parting word:--
_Master Shakespeare needn't take the crowder's fiddle, too._

Will has wealth and wealth to spare.
Give him back his own.
_At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone._
See his little lanthorn-spark.
Hear his ghostly tune,
Glimmering past you, in the dark,
Old blind Moone!

All the little crazy brooks, where love and sorrow run
Crowned with sedge and singing wild,
Like a sky-lark--or a child!--
Old blind Moone, he knew their springs, and played 'em every one;
Stood there, in the darkness, blind,
And sang them into Shakespeare's mind....
Old blind Moone of London, O now his songs are done,
The light upon his lost white face, they say it was the sun!

The light upon his poor old face, they say it was the sun!

OLD GREY SQUIRREL

A great while ago, there was a school-boy.
He lived in a cottage by the sea.
And the very first thing he could remember
Was the rigging of the schooners by the quay.

He could watch them, when he woke, from his window,
With the tall cranes hoisting out the freight.
And he used to think of shipping as a sea-cook,
And sailing to the Golden Gate.

For he used to buy the yellow penny dreadfuls,
And read them where he fished for conger eels,
And listened to the lapping of the water,
The green and oily water round the keels.

There were trawlers with their shark-mouthed flat-fish,
And red nets hanging out to dry,
And the skate the skipper kept because he liked 'em,
And landsmen never knew the fish to fry.

There were brigantines with timber out of Norroway,
Oozing with the syrups of the pine.
There were rusty dusty schooners out of Sunderland,
And ships of the Blue Cross line.

And to tumble down a hatch into the cabin
Was better than the best of broken rules;
For the smell of 'em was like a Christmas dinner,
And the feel of 'em was like a box of tools.

And, before he went to sleep in the evening,