come

No lore of Greece or Rome, No science peddling with the names of things,

Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, Can lift our life with wings Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits,

And lengthen out our dates With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates:

Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all!!
Not such the trumpet-call
Of thy diviner mood,
That could thy sons entice
From happy homes and toils, the fruit-
ful nest

Of those half-virtues which the world calls best,

Into War's tumult rude;

But rather far that stern device The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood

In the dim, unventured wood,

The VERITAS that lurks beneath The letter's unprolific sheath, Life of whate'er makes life worth living, Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food,

One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.

III.

and drum,

best oil

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 doth leaven

Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,

The victim of thy genius, not its mate!"

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

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,

Still

Safe in himself as in a fate.
So always firmly he:

He knew to bide 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,

it

I strive to mix some gladness with my

I sweep

strain,

But the sad strings complain, And will not please the ear: them for a pæan, 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;

I with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead,

Who went, and who return not.
not so !

Say

mood

year,

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,

ter way?

ways,

Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!

IX.

But is there hope to save Even this ethereal essence from the grave?

What ever 'scaped Oblivion's subtle

wrong

Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song? Before my musing eye

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:

Yea, Manhood hath a wider span And larger privilege of life than man. The single deed, the private sacrifice, So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears,

Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years;

But that high privilege that makes all men peers,

That leap of heart whereby a people rise

Up to a noble anger's height, And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright, That swift validity in noble veins, Of choosing danger and disdaining shame,

Of being set on flame

By the pure fire that flies all contact

base,

But wraps its chosen with angelic might, These are imperishable gains,

Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, These hold great futures in their lusty reins

And certify to earth a new imperial race.

X.

Who now shall sneer?
Who dare again to say we trace
Our lines to a plebeian race?

Roundhead and Cavalier! Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud;

Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud,

They flit across the ear:

That is best blood that hath most iron in 't.

To edge resolve with, pouring without stint

For what makes manhood dear. Tell us not of Plantagenets, Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl

Down from some victor in a borderbrawl!

How poor their outworn coronets, Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath

Our brave for honor's blazon shall bequeath,

Through whose desert a rescued Nation

sets

Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears