turn

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your morals most drearily true;

But, since the earth clashed on her coffin,
I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
"T is a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock.

Communion in spirit! Forgive me,
But I, who am earthy and weak,
Would give all my incomes from dream-
land

For a touch of her hand on my cheek.

That little shoe in the corner,
So worn and wrinkled and brown,
With its emptiness confutes you,
And argues your wisdom down.

COMMEMORATION ODE. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, JULY 21, 1865.

LIFE may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So generous 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 stand self-poised on manhood's
solid earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

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:

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! They knew that outward grace is

dust;

They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,

Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,

A seamark now, now lost in vapors blind;

Broad prairie rather, genial, level. lined,

Fruitful and friendly for all human

kind,

Yet also nigh to Heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,

Ere any names of Serf and Peer
Could Nature's equal scheme deface;
Here was a type of the true elder

race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must

be

In him who condescends to victory Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:
He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide,
Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
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

strain,

But the sad strings complain,
And will not please the ear;

I sweep them for a pæan, but they wane
Again and yet again

Into a dirge, and die away in pain.
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;
I with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead,

Who went, and who return not.
Say not so!

229

repay,

'T is not the grapes of Canaan that 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.

Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack:

I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show;

We find in our dull road their shining track;

In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good,
Of all our saintlier aspiration;

They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!

MARIA WHITE LOWELL.

[U. s. A., 1821-1853.]

THE ALPINE SHEEP.

WHEN on my ear your loss was knelled, And tender sympathy upburst,

A little spring from memory welled, Which once had quenched my bitter thirst.

And I was fain to bear to you
A portion of its mild relief,
That it might be as healing dew,
To steal some fever from your grief.

After our child's untroubled breath
Up to the Father took its way,
And on our home the shade of Death
Like a long twilight haunting lay,

And friends came round, with us to weep
Her little spirit's swift remove,

The story of the Alpine sheep
Was told to us by one we love.

They, in the valley's sheltering care, Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, And when the sod grows brown and bare, The shepherd strives to make them climb

To airy shelves of pasture green,

That hang along the mountain's side, Where grass and flowers together lean, And down through mist the sunbeams slide.

But naught can tempt the timid things The steep and rugged paths to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,

And seared below the pastures lie,

Till in his arms their lambs he takes,
Along the dizzy verge to go;
Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
They follow on, o'er rock and snow.

And in those pastures, lifted fair,

More dewy-soft than lowland mead, The shepherd drops his tender care, And sheep and lambs together feed.

This parable, by Nature breathed,

Blew on me as the south-wind free O'er frozen brooks, that flow unsheathed From icy thraldom to the sea.

A blissful vision, through the night, Would all my happy senses sway, Of the good Shepherd on the height, Or climbing up the starry way,

Holding our little lamb asleep,

While, like the murmur of the sea, Sounded that voice along the deep, Saying, "Arise and follow me!"

THOMAS W. PARSONS.
[U. s. A.]

CAMPANILE DE PISA.

SNOW was glistening on the mountains, but the air was that of June, Leaves were falling, but the runnels playing still their summer tune,

And the dial's lazy shadow hovered nigh the brink of noon.

On the benches in the market, rows of languid idlers lay,

When to Pisa's nodding belfry, with a friend, I took my way.

From the top we looked around us, and as far as eye might strain,

Saw no sign of life or motion in the town, or on the plain,

Hardly seemed the river moving, through the willows to the main; Nor was any noise disturbing Pisa from her drowsy hour,

Save the doves that fluttered 'neath us, in and out and round the tower.

Not a shout from gladsome children, or the clatter of a wheel,

Nor the spinner of the suburb, winding his discordant reel,

Nor the stroke upon the pavement of a hoof or of a heel.

Even the slumberers, in the churchyard of the Campo Santo seemed Scarce more quiet than the living world that underneath us dreamed.

Dozing at the city's portal, heedless guard the sentry kept,

More than oriental dulness o'er the sunny farms had crept,

Near the walls the ducal herdsman by the dusty roadside slept; While his camels, resting round him, half alarmed the sullen ox, Seeing those Arabian monsters pasturing with Etruria's flocks.

Then it was, like one who wandered, lately, singing by the Rhine,

Strains perchance to maiden's hearing sweeter than this verse of mine, That we bade Imagination lift us on her wing divine.

And the days of Pisa's greatness rose from the sepulchral past,

When a thousand conquering galleys bore her standard at the mast.

Memory for a moment crowned her sovereign mistress of the seas, When she braved, upon the billows, Venice and the Genoese, Daring to deride the Pontiff, though he shook his angry keys.

self the joyful day,

231

Never on the thronged Rialto showed the Carnival more gay.

Suddenly the bell beneath us broke the vision with its chime; "Signors," quoth our gray attendant, "it is almost vesper time"; Vulgar life resumed its empire, -down we dropt from the sublime. Here and there a friar passed us, as we paced the silent streets, And a cardinal's rumbling carriage roused the sleepers from the seats.

The lips, as Cuma's cavern close,

The cheeks, with fast and sorrow thin, The rigid front, almost morose,

But for the patient hope within, Declare a life whose course hath been Unsullied still, though still severe, Which, through the wavering days of sin, Keep itself icy-chaste and clear.

Not wholly such his haggard look

When wandering once, forlorn he strayed,

With no companion save his book,

To Corvo's hushed monastic shade: Where, as the Benedictine laid

His palm upon the pilgrim-guest, The single boon for which he prayed The convent's charity was rest.