Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.

Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath
Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed, With sweet, stern face unveiled, And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

. IV.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and

glides

Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides

To make the next age better for the
last?

Is earth too poor to give us Something to live for here that shall outlive us?

Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we see
From doubt is never free;
The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;
With our laborious hiving
What men call treasure, and the gods
call dross,

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,

After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires,

Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,

Are tossed pell-mell together in the

grave.

But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our likeness still we shape our
fate.

Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;

A seed of sunshine that can leaven

Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,

To front a lie in arms and not to yield,

This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
Limbed like the old heroic breeds,
Who stands self-poised on man-
hood's solid earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his
birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

VI.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,
With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief:
Forgive me, if from present things I

turn

To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,

And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.

Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she

threw,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,

Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ;

One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,

Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth,

And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

Still

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:

He knew to hide his time,
And can his fame abide,

patient in his simple faith sub-
lime,

Till the wise years decide. Great captains, with their guns and drums,

Disturb our judgment for the hour,

But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

New birth of our new soil, the first

American.

masks,

I strive to mix some gladness with my

strain,

But the sad strings complain, And will not please the ear: I sweep them for a pan, but they wane Into a dirge, and die away, in pain. Again and yet again In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,

Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:

Fitlier may others greet the living,
For me the past is unforgiving;
J with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead,

Who went, and who return not.
not so!

Say

mood

But the high faith that failed not by the way;

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave;

No bar of endless night exiles the brave;

And to the saner mind

We rather seem the dead that stayed

behind.

The mighty ones of old sweep by, Disvoiced now and insubstantial things,

As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings,

Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,

And many races, nameless long ago, To darkness driven by that imperious gust

Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow:

O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only Change, Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range! Shall we to more continuance make pretence?

Renown builds tombs; a life-estate is Wit;

And, bit by bit,

The cunning years steal all from us but woe;

Leaves are we, whose decays no har

vest sow.

But, when we vanish hence, Shall they lie forceless in the dark below, Save to make green their little length of sods,

Or deepen pansies for a year or two, Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods?

Was dying all they had the skill to do? That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents

Such short-lived service, as if blind

events

Ruled without her, or earth could so endure;

She claims a more divine investiture Of longer tenure than Fame's airy rents;

Whate'er she touches doth her nature share; Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air,

Gives eyes to mountains blind, Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind,

And her clear trump sings succor everywhere

By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind;

For soul inherits all that soul could dare: