The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place

      With their broadsheets of rhymes,

The street rings no longer in treble and bass

      With their skits on the times,

And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space

   That but echoes the stammering chimes.

From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs,

      Away the folk roam

By the “Hart” and Grey’s Bridge into byways and “drongs,”

      Or across the ridged loam;

The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs,

   The old saying, “Would we were home.”

The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair

      Now rattles and talks,

And that one who looked the most swaggering there

      Grows sad as she walks,

And she who seemed eaten by cankering care

   In statuesque sturdiness stalks.

And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts

      Of its buried burghees,

From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts

      Whose remains one yet sees,

Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts

   At their meeting-times here, just as these!

1902.

Note.—“The Chimes” (line 6) will be listened for in vain here at midnight now, having been abolished some years ago.