The broken circle of stones, some in their original position, some bending over like old men, some lying prostrate, suggested the thoughts which took form in the following verses.  They were read at the annual meeting, in January, of the class which graduated at Harvard College in the year 1829.  Eight of the fifty-nine men who graduated sat round the small table.  There were several other classmates living, but infirmity, distance, and other peremptory reasons kept them from being with us.  I have read forty poems at our successive annual meetings.  I will introduce this last one by quoting a stanza from the poem I read in 1851:—­

  As one by one is falling
    Beneath the leaves or snows,
  Each memory still recalling
    The broken ring shall close,
  Till the night winds softly pass
    O’er the green and growing grass,
  Where it waves on the graves
    Of the “Boys of ’Twenty-nine.”

  THE BROKEN CIRCLE.

  I stood on Sarum’s treeless plain,
    The waste that careless Nature owns;
  Lone tenants of her bleak domain,
    Loomed huge and gray the Druid stones.

  Upheaved in many a billowy mound
    The sea-like, naked turf arose,
  Where wandering flocks went nibbling round
    The mingled graves of friends and foes.

  The Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane,
    This windy desert roamed in turn;
  Unmoved these mighty blocks remain
    Whose story none that lives may learn.

  Erect, half buried, slant or prone,
    These awful listeners, blind and dumb,
  Hear the strange tongues of tribes unknown,
    As wave on wave they go and come.

  “Who are you, giants, whence and why?”
    I stand and ask in blank amaze;
  My soul accepts their mute reply: 
    “A mystery, as are you that gaze.

  “A silent Orpheus wrought the charm
    From riven rocks their spoils to bring;
  A nameless Titan lent his arm
    To range us in our magic ring.

  “But Time with still and stealthy stride,
    That climbs and treads and levels all,
  That bids the loosening keystone slide,
    And topples down the crumbling wall,—­

  “Time, that unbuilds the quarried past,
    Leans on these wrecks that press the sod;
  They slant, they stoop, they fall at last,
    And strew the turf their priests have trod.

  “No more our altar’s wreath of smoke
    Floats up with morning’s fragrant dew;
  The fires are dead, the ring is broke,
    Where stood the many stand the few.”

  —­My thoughts had wandered far away,
     Borne off on Memory’s outspread wing,
  To where in deepening twilight lay
     The wrecks of friendship’s broken ring.

  Ah me! of all our goodly train
     How few will find our banquet hall! 
  Yet why with coward lips complain
     That this must lean and that must fall?