"Is there no hope?" I moaned, "so strong, so fair!

Our Fowler whose proud bird would brook erewhile

No rival's swoop in all our western air!
Gather the ravens, then, in funeral file
For him, life's morn yet golden in his hair?

"Leave me not hopeless, ye unpitying dames!

I see, half seeing. Tell me, ye who scanned The stars, Earth's elders, still must noblest aims

Be traced upon oblivious ocean-sands? Must Hesper join the wailing ghosts of names?"

"We sing old Sagas, songs of weal and woe, Mystic because too cheaply understood; Dark sayings are not ours; men hear and know,

See Evil weak, see strength alone in Good, Yet hope to stem God's fire with walls of tow.

"Time Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is, That offers choice of glory or of gloom; The solver makes Time Shall Be surely

his.

But hasten, Sisters! for even now the tomb Grates its slow hinge and calls from the

abyss."

"But not for him," I cried, "not yet for him,

Whose large horizon, westering, star by

star

Wins from the void to where on Ocean's rim

The sunset shuts the world with golden bar, Not yet his thews shall fail, his eye grow dim!

'T WERE no hard task, perchance, to win The popular laurel for my song;

'T were only to comply with sin,

Patient by town and tower I wait,
Or o'er the blustering moorland go;
I buy no praise at cheaper rate,
Or what faint hearts may fancy so;
For me, no joy in lady's bower,

Or hall, or tourney, will I sing,
Till the slow stars wheel round the hour
That crowns my hero and my king.

While all the land runs red with strife, And wealth is won by pedler-crimes, Let who will find content in life

And tinkle in unmanly rhymes; I wait and seek; through dark and light, Safe in my heart my hope I bring, Till I once more my faith may plight

To him my whole soul owns her king.

When power is filched by drone and dolt,

And, with caught breath and flashing eye, Her knuckles whitening round the bolt,

Vengeance leans eager from the sky, While this and that the people guess,

And to the skirts of praters cling,
Who court the crowd they should compress,
I turn in scorn to seek my king.

Shut in what tower of darkling chance
Or dungeon of a narrow doom,
Dream'st thou of battle-axe and lance
That for the Cross make crashing room?
Come! with hushed breath the battle waits
In the wild van thy mace's swing;
While doubters parley with their fates,
Make thou thine own and ours, my king!

O strong to keep upright the old,
And wise to buttress with the new,
Prudent, as only are the bold,
Clear-eyed, as only are the true,
To foes benign, to friendship stern,
Intent to imp Law's broken wing,
Who would not die, if death might earn
The right to kiss thy hand, my king?

In a letter to Colonel Shaw's mother, written August 28, 1863, Lowell says: "I have been writing something about Robert; and if, after keeping a little while, it should turn out to be a poem I shall print it, but not unless I think it some way worthy of what I feel, however, for the best verse falls short of noble living and dying such as his. I would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be, through all the hovels of an outcast race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute." He kept the poem three months and then wrote to Mr. Fields,-"You know I owe you a poem-two in my reckoning, and here is one of them. If this is not to your mind, I can hammer you out another. I have a feeling that some of it is good- but is it too long? I want to fling my leaf on dear Shaw's grave. Perhaps I was wrong in stiffening the feet of my verses a little, in order to give them a kind

of slow funeral tread. But I conceived it so, and so it would be. I wanted the poem a little monumental, perhaps I have made it obituary. But tell me just how it strikes you, and don't be afraid of my nerves. They can stand much in the way of friendly frankness, and besides, I find I am acquiring a vice of modesty as I grow older."

In another letter, when speaking of the distinction between odes for the closet and odes for recitation, he says: "I chose my measures with my ears open. So I did in writing the poem on Rob Shaw. That is regular because meant only to be read, and because also I thought it should have in the form of its stanza something of the formality of an epitaph." When, in the last stanza, Lowell wrote "I write of one,

While with dim eyes I think of three," the reader recalls that moving passage in No. X. of the second series of Biglow Papers, where Mr. Hosea Biglow in his homely speech bursts forth: :

"Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee?
Did n't I love to see 'em growin',
Three likely lads ez wal could be,"

and one knows of whom Lowell was thinking.