HOW shall we honour the young, | |
| The ardent, the gifted? how mourn? | |
| Console we cannot; her ear | |
| Is deaf. Far northward from here, | |
| In a churchyard high mid the moors | 5 |
| Of Yorkshire, a little earth | |
| Stops it for ever to praise. | |
| |
| Where, behind Keighly, the road | |
| Up to the heart of the moors | |
| Beneath heath-clad showery hills | 10 |
| Runs, and colliers carts | |
| Poach the deep ways coming down, | |
| And a rough, grim’d race have their homes— | |
| There, on its slope, is built | |
| The moorland town. But the church | 15 |
| Stands on the crest of the hill, | |
| Lonely and bleak; at its side | |
| The parsonage house and the graves. | |
| |
| See! in the desolate house | |
| The children’s father. Alas— | 20 |
| Age, whom the most of us chide, | |
| Chide, and put back, and delay— | |
| Come, unupbraided for once! | |
| Lay thy benumbing hand, | |
| Gratefully cold on this brow! | 25 |
| Shut out the grief, the despair! | |
| Weaken the sense of his loss! | |
| Deaden the infinite pain! | |
| |
| Another grief I see, | |
| Younger: but this the Muse, | 30 |
| In pity, with silent awe | |
| Revering what she cannot sooth, | |
| With veil’d face and bow’d head, | |
| Salutes, and passes by. | |
| |
| Strew with roses the grave | 35 |
| Of the early-dying. Alas! | |
| Early she goes on the path | |
| To the Silent Country, and leaves | |
| |
| Half his laurels unwon, | |
| Dying too soon; yet green | 40 |
| Laurels she had, and a course | |
| Short, yet redoubled by Fame. | |
| |
