ROLL forth, my song, like the rushing river | |
| That sweeps along to the mighty sea; | |
| God will inspire me while I deliver | |
| My soul to thee! | |
| |
| Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening | 5 |
| Amid the last homes of youth and eld, | |
| That there once was one whose veins ran lightning | |
| No eye beheld. | |
| |
| Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour, | |
| How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom, | 10 |
| No star of all heaven sends to light our | |
| Path to the tomb. | |
| |
| Roll on, my song, and to after ages | |
| Tell how, disdaining all earth can give, | |
| He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages | 15 |
| The way to live. | |
| |
| And tell how trampled, derided, hated, | |
| And worn by weakness, disease and wrong, | |
| He fled for shelter to God, who mated | |
| His soul with song— | 20 |
| |
| With song which alway, sublime or vapid, | |
| Flowed like a rill in the morning beam, | |
| Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid— | |
| A mountain stream. | |
| |
| Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long | 25 |
| To herd with demons from hell beneath, | |
| Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long | |
| For even death. | |
| |
| Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, | |
| Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love, | 30 |
| With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted | |
| He still, still strove. | |
| |
| Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others, | |
| And some whose hands should have wrought for him | |
| (If children live not for sires and mothers), | 35 |
| His mind grew dim. | |
| |
| And he fell far through that pit abysmal, | |
| The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns, | |
| And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal | |
| Stock of returns. | 40 |
| |
| But yet redeemed it in days of darkness, | |
| And shapes and signs of the final wrath, | |
| When death, in hideous and ghastly starkness, | |
| Stood in his path. | |
| |
| And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow, | 45 |
| And want, and sickness, and houseless nights, | |
| He bides in calmness the silent morrow | |
| That no ray lights. | |
| |
| And lives he still then? Yes! Old and hoary | |
| At thirty-nine, from despair and woe, | 50 |
| He lives, enduring what future story | |
| Will never know. | |
| |
| Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble, | |
| Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell! | |
| He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble, | 55 |
| Here and in hell. | |
| |
