Repose unbroken now his dust surrounds,
He is with those whom mortals honor most.
Respect and tender sighs and holy sounds
Of choirs, and the presence of the Holy Ghost
And fellow spirits and shadowy mem'ries dear
Make for his rest a sacred atmosphere.
Sometime a gentle and profound Divine,
Father revered of spiritual sons.
He died. They laid him here. About his shrine,
Of what they wrote this remnant legend runs:
"Nascitur omnis homo peccato mortuus
Una post cineres virtus vivere sola facit."[A]
There as I breathed the lesson of the dead:
Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead:
"O be not of the throng ephemeral
To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate,
Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall,
Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral—
A phantom generation fatuate.
Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save,
Virtue alone revives beyond the grave."
[Footnote A: "Every man is born dead in sin. Virtue alone brings life eternal.">[
STANCHEZZA.
EARLY LINES
Lo Zephyr floats, on pinions delicate,
Past the dark belfry, where a deep-toned bell
Sways back and forth, Grief tolling out the knell
For thee, my friend, so young and yet so great.
Dead—thou art dead. The destiny of men
Is ever thus, like waves upon the main
To rise, grow great, fall with a crash and wane,
While still another grows to wane again,
Dead—thou art dead. Would that I too were gone
And that the grass which rustles on thy grave
Might also over mine forever wave
Made living by the death it grew upon.
I ask not Orpheus-like, that Pluto give
Thy soul to earth. I would not have thee live.
PRÆTERITA EX INSTANTIBUS.
How strange it is that, in the after age,—
When Time's clepsydra will be nearer dry—
That all the accustomed things we now pass by
Unmarked, because familiar, shall engage
The antique reverence of men to be;
And that quaint interest which prompts the sage
The silent fathoms of the past to gauge
Shall keep alive our own past memory,
Making all great of ours—the garb we wear—
Our voiceless cities, reft of roof and spire—
The very skull whence now the eye of fire
Glances bright sign of what the soul can dare.
So shall our annals make an envied lore,
And men will say, 'Thus did the men of yore.'