Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;

In this abstraction it were light to deem 210 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, 215 As truly most of us are little more.

3.

Him most 1 see whom we most dearly miss,
The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice
And armed neutrality of self-defence

220 Beneath the forehead's walled preäminence,

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

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

As he our fireside were, our light and heat,

Centre where minds diverse and various skills

230 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 235 While Holmes's rockets curve their long ellipse, And burst in seeds of fire that burst again To drop in scintillating rain.

216. Agassiz himself.

There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine, 240 Of him who taught us not to mow and mope About our fancied selves, but seek our scope In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope; Listening with eyes averse I see him sit Pricked with the cider of the judge's wit 245 (Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again), While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline Curves sharper to restrain

250

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,
255 The paler primrose of a second spring.

5.

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

238. 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 am 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 co-exist."

244. Judge E. R. Hoar.

251. Longfellow.

258. Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was buried in Concord, May 21, 1861.

By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,

260 Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's

sweep

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

265 Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep, While the orchards mocked us in their white ar

ray,

And building robins wondered at our tears,

Snatched in his prime, the shape august

That should have stood unbent 'neath fourscore

years,

270 The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,

All gone to speechless dust;

And he our passing guest,

Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest,
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,
275 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;

280 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,

272. Arthur Hugh Clough, an English poet, author of the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and editor of Dryden's Transhution 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.

285 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,

290 Of violets that to-day I scattered over him;
He, too, is there,

After the good centurion fitly named,

Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,
Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,

295 Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,
Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the
praise.

300

305

6.

Yea truly, as the sallowing years

Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves
Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,
And that unwakened winter nears,
'Tis the void chair our surest guests receives,
'Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,
'Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;
We count our rosary by the beads we miss :
To me, at least, it seemeth so,

An exile in the land once found divine,

While my starved fire burns low,

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

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

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

And homeless winds at the loose casement whine
Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

IV.

1.

310 Now forth into the darkness all are gone,
But memory, still unsated, follows on,
Retracing step by step our homeward walk,
With many a laugh among our serious talk,
Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,
315 The long red streamers from the windows glide,
Or the dim western moon

Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon,
And Boston shows a soft Venetian side
In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,
320 Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;
Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide
Shivered the winter stars, while all below,
As if an end were come of human ill,

The world was wrapt in innocence of snow
325 And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;
These were our poetry; in him perhaps
Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,
And he would rather count the perch and bream
Than with the current's idle fancy lapse;

330 And yet he had the poet's open eye

That takes a frank delight in all it sees,
Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky,
To him the life-long friend of fields and trees:

315. In walking over West Boston bridge at night one sees the lights from the houses on Beacon Street reflected in the water below and seeming to make one long light where flame and reflection join.