Ye bull-dogs witness, and ye Proctors;
How bright his jests, how aptly put
His scorn of duns, and Dons, and Doctors.
We laughed at care, read now and then--
Though vexed by EUCLID on the same bridge--
Ah, men in those great days were men
When JACK and I wore gowns at Cambridge.

We paid our fines, we paid our fees,
And, though the Dons seemed stony-hearted,
We both got very fair degrees,
And then, like other friends, we parted.
And when we said good-bye at last
I vowed through life to be his brother--
And more than forty years have passed
Since each set eyes upon the other.

And so through all these changing years
With all their thousand changing faces,
Their failures, hopes, successes, fears,
In half a hundred different places,
JACK still has been the same to me,
As bright within my memory's fair book
As when we met in '43,
And smiled about that fallen prayer-book.

Ah well, the moments swiftly stream
Unheeded through the upturned hour-glass;
I've lived my life, and dreamed my dream,
And quaffed the sweet, as now the sour glass.