| |
| GENTLE and grave, in simple dress, | |
| And features by keen mountain air | |
| Moulded to solemn ruggedness, | |
| The man we came to see sat there: | |
| Not apt for speech, nor quickly stirr’d | 5 |
| Unless when heart to heart replied; | |
| A bearing equally remov’d | |
| From vain display or sullen pride. | |
| |
| The sinewy frame yet spoke of one | |
| Known to the hillsides: on his head | 10 |
| Some five-and-seventy winters gone | |
| Their crown of perfect white had shed:— | |
| As snow-tipp’d summits toward the sun | |
| In calm of lonely radiance press, | |
| Touch’d by the broadening light of death | 15 |
| With a serener pensiveness. | |
| |
| O crown of venerable age! | |
| O brighter crown of well-spent years! | |
| The bard, the patriot, and the sage, | |
| The heart that never bow’d to fears! | 20 |
| That was an age of soaring souls; | |
| Yet none with a more liberal scope | |
| Survey’d the sphere of human things; | |
| None with such manliness of hope. | |
| |
| Others, perchance, as keenly felt, | 25 |
| As musically sang as he; | |
| To Nature as devoutly knelt, | |
| Or toil’d to serve humanity: | |
| But none with those ethereal notes, | |
| That star-like sweep of self-control; | 30 |
| The insight into worlds unseen, | |
| The lucid sanity of soul. | |
| |
| The fever of our fretful life, | |
| The autumn poison of the air, | |
| The soul with its own self at strife, | 35 |
| He saw and felt, but could not share: | |
| With eye made clear by pureness, pierced | |
| The life of Man and Nature through; | |
| And read the heart of common things, | |
| Till new seem’d old, and old was new. | 40 |
| |
| To his own self not always just, | |
| Bound in the bonds that all men share,— | |
| Confess the failings as we must, | |
| The lion’s mark is always there! | |
| Nor any song so pure, so great | 45 |
| Since his, who closed the sightless eyes, | |
| Our Homer of the war in Heaven, | |
| To wake in his own Paradise. | |
| |
| O blaring trumpets of the world! | |
| O glories, in their budding sere! | 50 |
| O flaunting roll of Fame unfurl’d! | |
| Here was the king—the hero here! | |
| It was a strength and joy for life | |
| In that great presence once to be; | |
| That on the boy he gently smil’d, | 55 |
| That those white hands were laid on me. | |
| |
