| |
| WHEN, stricken by the freezing blast, | |
| A nation’s living pillars fall, | |
| How rich the storied page, how vast, | |
| A word, a whisper, can recall! | |
| |
| No medal lifts its fretted face, | 5 |
| Nor speaking marble cheats your eye; | |
| Yet, while these pictured lines I trace, | |
| A living image passes by: | |
| |
| A roof beneath the mountain pines; | |
| The cloisters of a hill-girt plain; | 10 |
| The front of life’s embattled lines; | |
| A mound beside the heaving main. | |
| |
| These are the scenes: a boy appears; | |
| Set life’s round dial in the sun, | |
| Count the swift arc of seventy years, | 15 |
| His frame is dust; his task is done. | |
| |
| Yet pause upon the noontide hour, | |
| Ere the declining sun has laid | |
| His bleaching rays on manhood’s power, | |
| And look upon the mighty shade. | 20 |
| |
| No gloom that stately shape can hide, | |
| No change uncrown his brow; behold! | |
| Dark, calm, large-fronted, lightning-eyed, | |
| Earth has no double from its mould! | |
| |
| Ere from the fields by valor won | 25 |
| The battle-smoke had rolled away, | |
| And bared the blood-red setting sun, | |
| His eyes were opened on the day. | |
| |
| His land was but a shelving strip, | |
| Black with the strife that made it free; | 30 |
| He lived to see its banners dip | |
| Their fringes in the western sea. | |
| |
| The boundless prairies learned his name, | |
| His words the mountain echoes knew; | |
| The northern breezes swept his fame | 35 |
| From icy lake to warm bayou. | |
| |
| In toil he lived; in peace he died; | |
| When life’s full cycle was complete, | |
| Put off his robes of power and pride, | |
| And laid them at his Master’s feet. | 40 |
| |
| His rest is by the storm-swept waves, | |
| Whom life’s wild tempests roughly tried, | |
| Whose heart was like the streaming caves | |
| Of ocean, throbbing at his side. | |
| |
| Death’s cold white hand is like the snow | 45 |
| Laid softly on the furrowed hill; | |
| It hides the broken seams below, | |
| And leaves the summit brighter still. | |
| |
| In vain the envious tongue upbraids; | |
| His name a nation’s heart shall keep, | 50 |
| Till morning’s latest sunlight fades | |
| On the blue tablet of the deep! | |
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