Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil

Amid the dusk of books to find her, Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.

Many in sad faith sought for her, Many with crossed hands sighed for her;

But these, our brothers, fought for
her,

At life's dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her,
Tasting the raptured fleetness
Of her divine completeness:

Their higher instinct knew Those love her best who to themselves are true,

And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;

They followed her and found her Where all may hope to find, 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

To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;

A seed of sunshine that doth leaven Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars,

And glorify our clay With light from fountains elder than the Day;

A conscience more divine than we,
A gladness fed with secret tears,
A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,

Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,

Still glimmering from the heights of undegenerate years.

V.

Whither leads the path
To ampler fates that leads?
Not down through flowery
meads,

To reap an aftermath

Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay

By battle's flashes gropes a desperate

way, And every turf the fierce foot clings-to bleeds.

Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword

Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought,

Whether from Baäl's stone obscene,

Or from the shrine serene

Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue

and pen

Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,

And, helpless in the fiery passion

caught,

Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men :

Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed

Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise,

And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;

I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;

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 stand self-poised on manhood's solid earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his

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 sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;

Broad prairie rather, genial, levellined,

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 man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

New birth of our new soil, the first American.

VII.

Long as man's hope insatiate can

discern

Or only guess some more inspiring goal

Outside of Self, enduring as the pole,

Along whose course the flying axles burn

Of spirits bravely-pitched, earth's manlier brood;

Long as below we cannot find The meed that stills the inexorable mind;

So long this faith to some ideal Good, Under whatever mortal names it masks,

Freedom, Law, Country, this ethereal mood

That thanks the Fates for their severer tasks,

Feeling its challenged pulses leap, While others skulk in subterfuges cheap,

And, set in Danger's van, has all the boon it asks,

Shall win man's praise and woman's

And seal these hours the noblest of our year, Save that our brothers found this better way?

VIII.

We sit here in the Promised Land That flows with Freedom's honey and milk;

But 't was they won it, sword in hand, Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.

We welcome back our bravest and our best ;

Ah me! not all ! some come not with the rest,

Who went forth brave and bright as any here !

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 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 !

'T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay,

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,