2.
The shape erect is prone: forever stilled
The winning tongue; the forehead’s high-piled heap,
A cairn which every science helped to build,
Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:
He knows at last if Life or Death be best:
Wherever he be flown, whatever vest
The being hath put on which lately here
So many-friended was, so full of cheer
To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest,
We have not lost him all; he is not gone
To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;
The beauty of his better self lives on
In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He trained to Truth’s exact severity;
He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air?
In endless file shall loving scholars come
The glow of his transmitted touch to share,
And trace his features with an eye less dim
Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.
Florence, Italy, February, 1874.
TO HOLMES
ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.
Dear Wendell, why need count the years
Since first your genius made me thrill,
If what moved then to smiles or tears,
Or both contending, move me still?
What has the Calendar to do
With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth
With gay immortals such as you
Whose years but emphasize your youth?
One air gave both their lease of breath;
The same paths lured our boyish feet;
One earth will hold us safe in death,
With dust of saints and scholars sweet.
Our legends from one source were drawn,
I scarce distinguish yours from mine,
And don’t we make the Gentiles yawn
With “You remembers?” o’er our wine!
If I, with too senescent air,
Invade your elder memory’s pale,
You snub me with a pitying “Where
Were you in the September Gale?”
Both stared entranced at Lafayette,
Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D.
What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet
As scarcely worth one’s while to see.