Rarely has an elegy to friendship been written better:
Heraclitus
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
— William Johnson Cory
Heraclitus himself besides being a philosopher wrote poetry. The beauty of his style gave rise the the epithet ‘nightingales’ for his poems.
According to scholars who learned at his feet, William Johnson Cory was one of the finest teachers ever to teach at Eton.