In the grim outcrop of our granite edge, The Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need 390 In the stiff sons of Calvin's iron breed,

As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep; But, though such intuitions might not cheer, Yet life was good to him, and, there or here, With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap; 395 Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere,

And, like those buildings great that through the

year

Carry one temperature, his nature large

Made its own climate, nor could any marge
Traced by convention stay him from his bent:

400 He had a habitude of mountain air;

405

He brought wide outlook where he went,
And could on sunny uplands dwell

Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair
High-hung of viny Neufchâtel,

Nor, surely, did he miss

Some pale, imaginary bliss

Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss.

V.

1.

I cannot think he wished so soon to die
With all his senses full of eager heat,

41 And rosy years that stood expectant by

To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,

He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet
Took with both hands unsparingly:

Truly this life is precious to the root,

397. This is said of St. Peter's in Rome.
411. See note to p. 395, 1. 12.

415 And good the feel of grass beneath the foot; To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,

Tenants in common with the bees,

And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of

trees,

Is better than long waiting in the tomb;

420 Only once more to feel the coming spring
As the birds feel it when it makes them sing,
Only once more to see the moon

Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms
Curve her mild sickle in the West

425 Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were a boon
Worth any promise of soothsayer realms
Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest;

To take December by the beard

And crush the creaking snow with springy foot, 430 While overhead the North's dumb streamers shoot, Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared;

435

440

Then the long evening ends
Lingered by cozy chimney-nooks,
With high companionship of books,
Or slippered talk of friends

And sweet habitual looks,

Is better than to stop the ears with dust.
Too soon the spectre comes to say, "Thou must!

2.

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast,
They comfort us with sense of rest;

They must be glad to lie forever still;

Their work is ended with their day;

Another fills their room; 't is the World's ancient way Whether for good or ill;

445

But the deft spinners of the brain,

Who love each added day and find it gain,

Them overtakes the doom

To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom (Trophy that was to be of life-long pain), 450 The thread no other skill can ever knit again.

'T was so with him, for he was glad to live,
'T was doubly so, for he left work begun;
Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive
Till all the allotted flax was spun?

455 It matters not: for go at night or noon,
A friend, whene'er he dies, has died too soon,
And, once we hear the hopeless He is dead,
So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

VI.

1.

I seem to see the black procession go:
460 That crawling prose of death too well I know,
The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;

I see it wind through that unsightly grove,"
Once beautiful, but long defaced

With granite permanence of cockney taste 465 And all those grim disfigurements we love: There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly

waste

Nature rebels at: and it is not true

Of those most precious parts of him we knew:
Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,

470 'T were sweet to leave this shifting life of tents Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;

Nay, to be mingled with the elements,
The fellow-servant of creative powers,

462. Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, where Agassiz

..es.

Partaker in the solemn year's events, 475 To share the work of busy-fingered hours, To be night's silent almoner of dew,

To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the oeean cavern through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow 480 About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all-disconsolate;

485

Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod
Of charitable earth

That takes out all our mortal stains,
And makes us clearlier neighbors of the clod
Methinks were better worth

Than the

poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains, The heart's insatiable ache:

But such was not his faith,

490 Nor mine: it may be he had trod

495

Outside the plain old path of God thus spake,
But God to him was very God,

And not a visionary wraith

Skulking in murky corners of the mind,
And he was sure to be

Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He,
Not with His essence mystically combined,
As some high spirits long, but whole and free,
A perfected and conscious Agassiz.
500 And such I figure him: the wise of old
Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,
Not truly with the guild enrolled
Of him who seeking inward guessed
Diviner riddles than the rest,

505

And groping in the darks of thought
Touched the Great Hand and knew it not;

503. Plato.

He rather shares the daily light,

From reason's charier fountains won,

Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, 510 And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

2.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled

The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled

heap,

A cairn which every science helped to build,
Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:

515 He knows at last if Life or Death be best:
Wherever he be flown, whatever vest

The being hath put on which lately here
So many-friended was, so full of cheer
To make men feel the Seeker's noble zest,
520 We have not lost him all; he is not gone
To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;
The beauty of his better self lives on

In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He trained to Truth's exact severity;

525 He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air?
In endless files shall loving scholars come
The glow of his transmitted touch to share,
And trace his features with an eye less dim
530 Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.

FLORENCE, ITALY, February, 1874.

509. Aristotle, so-called from his birthplace of Stagira in Mo cedonia.