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| I WRITE my name as one, | |
| On sands by waves o’errun | |
| Or winter’s frosted pane, | |
| Traces a record vain. | |
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| Oblivion’s blankness claims | 5 |
| Wiser and better names, | |
| And well my own may pass | |
| As from the strand or glass. | |
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| Wash on, O waves of time! | |
| Melt, noons, the frosty rime! | 10 |
| Welcome the shadow vast, | |
| The silence that shall last! | |
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| When I and all who know | |
| And love me vanish so, | |
| What harm to them or me | 15 |
| Will the lost memory be? | |
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| If any words of mine, | |
| Through right of life divine, | |
| Remain, what matters it | |
| Whose hand the message writ? | 20 |
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| Why should the “crowner’s quest” | |
| Sit on my worst or best? | |
| Why should the showman claim | |
| The poor ghost of my name? | |
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| Yet, as when dies a sound | 25 |
| Its spectre lingers round, | |
| Haply my spent life will | |
| Leave some faint echo still. | |
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| A whisper giving breath | |
| Of praise or blame to death, | 30 |
| Soothing or saddening such | |
| As loved the living much. | |
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| Therefore with yearnings vain | |
| And fond I still would fain | |
| A kindly judgment seek, | 35 |
| A tender thought bespeak. | |
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| And, while my words are read, | |
| Let this at least be said: | |
| “Whate’er his life’s defeatures, | |
| He loved his fellow-creatures. | 40 |
| |
| “If, of the Law’s stone table, | |
| To hold he scarce was able | |
| The first great precept fast, | |
| He kept for man the last. | |
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| “Through mortal lapse and dulness | 45 |
| What lacks the Eternal Fulness, | |
| If still our weakness can | |
| Love Him in loving man? | |
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| “Age brought him no despairing | |
| Of the world’s future faring; | 50 |
| In human nature still | |
| He found more good than ill. | |
| |
| “To all who dumbly suffered, | |
| His tongue and pen he offered; | |
| His life was not his own, | 55 |
| Nor lived for self alone. | |
| |
| “Hater of din and riot | |
| He lived in days unquiet; | |
| And, lover of all beauty, | |
| Trod the hard ways of duty. | 60 |
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| “He meant no wrong to any, | |
| He sought the good of many, | |
| Yet knew both sin and folly,— | |
| May God forgive him wholly!” | |
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