brow,

course,

Why for his power benign seek an impurer source?

His was the true enthusiasm that burns long, Domestically bright,

Fed from itself and shy of human sight, The hidden force that makes a lifetime strong,

And not the short-lived fuel of a song. Passionless, say you? What is passion for

But to sublime our natures and control To front heroic toils with late return, Or none, or such as shames the con queror?

That fire was fed with substance of the soul

And not with holiday stubble, that could burn,

Unpraised of men who after bonfires run, Through seven slow years of unadvancing

war,

Equal when fields were lost or fields were won,

With breath of popular applause or blame,

Nor fanned nor damped, unquenchably the same,

Too inward to be reached by flaws of idle fame.

3.

As life's indifferent gifts to all men born; | Dumb for himself, unless it were to God, But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent, Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,

Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content; Modest, yet firm as Nature's self; unblamed

Save by the men his nobler temper shamed;

Never seduced through show of present good

By other than unsetting lights to steer New-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood

More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear;

Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still

In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;

Not honored then or now because he wooed

The popular voice, but that he still withstood;

Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but one

Who was all this and ours, and all men's, WASHINGTON.

For ardent girls and boys
Who find no genius in a mind so clear
That its grave depths seem obvious and

near,

Nor a soul great that made so little noise.

They feel no force in that calm-cadenced phrase,

The habitual full-dress of his well-bred mind,

That seems to pace the minuet's courtly

maze

And tell of ampler leisures, roomier length of days.

His firm-based brain, to self so little kind

That no tumultuary blood could blind, Formed to control men, not amaze, Looms not like those that borrow height of haze :

It was a world of statelier movement then

Than this we fret in, he a denizen
Of that ideal Rome that made a man for

men.

VI. 1.

THE longer on this earth we live
And weigh the various qualities of men,
Seeing how most are fugitive,
Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,
Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters
of the fen,

The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty

Of plain devotedness to duty,
Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal
praise,

But finding amplest recompense
For life's ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted
days.

For this we honor him, that he could know

How sweet the service and how free Of her, God's eldest daughter here below,

And choose in meanest raiment which was she.

2.

Placid completeness, life without a fall From faith or highest aims, truth's breachless wall,

Surely if any fame can bear the touch,

!

The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.

guess,

Piling its thunder-heads and muttering

"Cease!"

What shall we give her back but love and praise

As in the dear old unestranged days Before the inevitable wrong began? Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country, giving him, And we owe alway what we owed thee then :

The boon thou wouldst have snatched

from us agen Shines as before with no abatement dim. A great man's memory is the only thing

With influence to outlast the present whim

And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.

All of him that was subject to the hours

Lies in thy soil and makes it part of

ours:

Across more recent graves,
Where unresentful Nature waves
Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod,
Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,
We from this consecrated plain stretch

out

Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt

As here the united North

Poured her embrowned manhood forth In welcome of our savior and thy son. Through battle we have better learned thy worth,

The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,

Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,

Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.

Both thine and ours the victory hardly

won;

If ever with distempered voice or pen We have misdeemed thee, here we take

it back,

And for the dead of both don common black.

Be to us evermore as thou wast then, As we forget thou hast not always been,

Mother of States and unpolluted men, Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!

AN ODE

FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876.

I. 1.

ENTRANCED I saw a vision in the cloud That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky, Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the

eye,

Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy In golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd: There, mid unreal forms that came and went

In robes air-spun, of evanescent dye, A woman's semblance shone pre-emineut;

Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud,

But, as on household diligence intent, Beside her visionary wheel she bent Like Aretë or Bertha, nor than they Less queenly in her port: about her knee

Glad children clustered confident in play: Placid her pose, the calm of energy; And over her broad brow in many a round

(That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem),

Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound

In lustrous coils, a natural diadem.
The cloud changed shape, obsequious to

the whim

Seven years long was the bow
Of battle bent, and the heightening
Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe
Of their uncontainable lightening;
Seven years long heard the sea
Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder;
Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee,
And new stars were seen, a world's
wonder;

Each by her sisters made bright,
All binding all to their stations,
Cluster of manifold light
Startling the old constellations :
Men looked up and grew pale:
Was it a comet or star,
Omen of blessing or bale,
Hung o'er the ocean afar?

4.

Stormy the day of her birth :
Was she not born of the strong,
She, the last ripeness of earth,
Beautiful, prophesied long?
Stormy the days of her prime:
Hers are the pulses that beat
Higher for perils sublime,
Making them fawn at her feet.
Was she not born of the strong?
Was she not born of the wise?
Daring and counsel belong
Of right to her confident eyes :
Human and motherly they,
Careless of station or race :
Hearken! her children to-day
Shout for the joy of her face.

II. 1.

No praises of the past are hers,
No fanes by hallowing time caressed,
No broken arch that ministers
To some sad instinct in the breast:

She has not gathered from the years
Grandeur of tragedies and tears,
Nor from long leisure the unrest
That finds repose in forms of classic

grace:

These may delight the coming race Who haply shall not count it to our crime

That we who fain would sing are here before our time.

She also hath her monuments;

Not such as stand decrepitly resigned To ruin-mark the path of dead events That left no seed of better days behind,

The tourist's pensioners that show their

scars

And maunder of forgotten wars; She builds not on the ground, but in the mind,

Her open-hearted palaces

For larger-thoughted men with heaven and earth at ease:

Her march the plump mow marks, the sleepless wheel,

The golden sheaf, the self-swayed commonweal;

The happy homesteads hid in orchard

trees

Whose sacrificial smokes through peace

ful air