No prince presume; for still himself he bare
At manhood's simple level, and where'er
He met a stranger, there he left a friend.
How large an aspect! nobly unsevere,
With freshness round him of Oympian cheer,
Like visits of those earthly gods he came;
His look, wherever its good-fortune fell,
Doubled the feast without a miracle,

And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame;
Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign;
Amphitryon's gold-juice humanized to wine.

180

185

III.

1.

The garrulous memories

Gather again from all their far-flown nooks,
Singly at first, and then by twos and threes,
Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks

Thicken their twilight files

Tow'rds Tintern's gray repose of roofless aisles:
Once more I see him at the table's head

When Saturday her monthly banquet spread

To scholars, poets, wits,

All choice, some famous, loving things, not names,
And so without a twinge at others' fames,

190

195

185. For the stories of Philemon and Amphitryon, see Ovid's Metamorphoses, viii. 631 and vi. 112.

192. Tintern Abbey on the river Wye is one of the most famous ruins in England. About this, as about other ruins and shaded buildings, the rooks make their home.

194. A club known as the Saturday Club has for many years met in Boston, and some of the prominent members are intimated in the following lines.

Such company as wisest moods befits,
Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth
Of undeliberate mirth,

Natures benignly mixed of air and earth,
Now with the stars and now with equal zest
Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.

2.

I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,
The living and the dead I see again,

200

205

And but my chair is empty; 'mid them all
'Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain
Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain:
Well-nigh I doubt which world is real most,
Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;
In this abstraction it were light to deem
Myself the figment of some stronger dream;
They are the real things, and I the ghost
That glide unhindered through the solid door,
Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,
And strive to speak and am but futile air,
As truly most of us are little more.

3.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,
The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice
And armed neutrality of self-defence
Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence,

While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,
Settles off-hand our human how and whence;
The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears
The infallible strategy of volunteers

218. Agassiz himself.

210

215

220

225

Making through Nature's walls its easy breach,
And seems to learn where he alone could teach.
Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills

As he our fireside were, our light and heat,
Centre where minds diverse and various skills
Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;
I see the firm benignity of face,

Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,
The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,

The

eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips
While Holmes's rockets curve their long ellipse,
And burst in seeds of fire that burst again
To drop in scintillating rain.

230

235

4.

There too the face half-rustic, half-divine,
Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,
Of him who taught us not to mow and mope
About our fancied selves, but seek our scope

240

In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope,

Content with our New World and timely bold
To challenge the o'ermastery of the old;
Listening with eyes averse I see him sit
Pricked with the cider of the Judge's wit

245

240. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The words half-rustic, halfdivine, recall Lowell's earlier characterization in his Fable for Critics:

"A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range
Has Olympus for one pole, for t' other the Exchange;
He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid
The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),
A Plotinus Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist
And the Gascon's shrewd wit cheek by jowl coexist."

248. Judge E. R. Hoar.

(Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),
While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline
Curves sharper to restrain

The merriment whose most unruly moods

Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods
Of silence-shedding pine:

Hard by is he whose art's consoling spell
Has given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,
His look still vernal 'mid the wintry ring
Of petals that remember, not foretell,
The paler primrose of a second spring.

250

255

5.

And more there are: but other forms arise
And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes:
First he from sympathy still held apart

By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,

260

Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's

sweep

Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill, 265
And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,-
New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,
November nature with a name of May,

Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep,
While the orchards mocked us in their white array, 270
And building robins wondered at our tears,
Snatched in his prime, the shape august

That should have stood unbent 'neath fourscore years,
The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,

All gone to speechless dust;

255. Longfellow.

275

262. Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was buried in Concord, May 23, 1864.

And he our passing guest,

Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest,
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,
Who brought ripe Oxford's culture to our board,
The Past's incalculable hoard,

Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,
Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet
With immemorial lisp of musing feet;

Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar's,
Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,
Poet in all that poets have of best,

But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims,
Who now hath found sure rest,

Not by still Isis or historic Thames,

Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me,
But, not misplaced, by Arno's hallowed brim,
Nor scorned by Santa Croce's neighboring fames,
Haply not mindless, wheresoe'er he be,
Of violets that to-day I scattered over him;
He, too, is there,

After the good centurion fitly named,

280

285

290

295

276. Arthur Hugh Clough, an English poet, author of the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and editor of Dryden's Translation of Plutarch's Lives, who came to this country in 1852 with some purpose of making it his home, but returned to England in less than a year. He lived while here in Cambridge, and strong attachments grew up between him and the men of letters in Cambridge and Concord.

291. Clough died in his forty-third year, November 13, 1861, and was buried in the little Protestant cemetery outside the walls of Florence.

292. Santa Croce is the church in Florence where many illustrious dead are buried, among them Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Alfieri.

296. Cornelius Conway Felton, Professor of Greek Language and Literature in Harvard College, and afterward President until his death in 1862.