Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, LVI–LXV

Peace, come away: the song of woe Is after all an earthly song: Peace, come away; we do him wrong To sing so wildly; let us go.

Come, let us go, your cheeks are pale, But half my life I leave behind; Methinks my friend is richly shrined, But I shall pass; my work will fail.

Yet in these ears till hearing dies, One set slow bell will seem to toll The passing of the sweetest soul That ever looked with human eyes.

I hear it now, and o’er and o’er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said, ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore!

In those sad words I took farewell: Like echoes in sepulchral halls, As drop by drop the water falls In vaults and catacombs, they fell;

And, falling, idly broke the peace Of hearts that beat from day to day, Half-conscious of their dying clay, And those cold crypts where they shall cease.

The high Muse answer’d: ‘Wherefore grieve Thy brethren with a fruitless tear? Abide a little longer here, And thou shalt take a nobler leave.’

He past; a soul of nobler tone: My spirit loved and loves him yet, Like some poor girl whose heart is set On one whose rank exceeds her own.

He mixing with his proper sphere, She finds the baseness of her lot; Half jealous of she knows not what, And envying all that meet him there.

The little village looks forlorn; She sighs amid her narrow days, Moving about the household ways, In that dark house where she was born.

The foolish neighbours come and go, And tease her till the day draws by; At night she weeps, ‘How vain am I! How should he love a thing so low?’

If, in thy second state sublime, Thy ransom’d reason change replies With all the circle of the wise, The perfect flower of human time;

And if thou cast thine eyes below, How dimly character’d and slight, How dwarf’d a growth of cold and night, How blanch’d with darkness must I grow!

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, Where thy first form was made a man: I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.

Tho’ if an eye that’s downward cast Could make thee somewhat blench or fail, So be my love an idle tale, And fading legend of the past;

And thou, as one that once declined, When he was little more than boy, On some unworthy heart with joy, But lives to wed an equal mind;

And breathes a novel world, the while His other passion wholly dies, Or in the light of deeper eyes Is matter for a flying smile.

Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven, And love in which my hound has part, Can hang no weight upon my heart In its assumptions up to heaven;

And I am so much more than these, As thou, perchance, art more than I, And yet I spare them sympathy And I would set their pains at ease.

So may’st thou watch me where I weep, As, unto vaster motions bound, The circuits of thine orbit round A higher height, a deeper deep.

Dost thou look back on what hath been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;

Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mould a mighty state’s decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope The pillar of a people’s hope, The centre of a world’s desire;

Yet feels, as in a pensive dream, When all his active powers are still, A distant dearness in the hill, A secret sweetness in the stream,

The limit of his narrower fate, While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counsellors and kings, With one that was his earliest mate;

Who ploughs with pain his native lea And reaps the labour of his hands, Or in the furrow musing stands; ‘Does my old friend remember me?’

Sweet soul! do with me as thou wilt; I lull a fancy trouble-tost With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost, A little grain shall not be spilt.’

And in that solace can I sing, Till out of painful phases wrought There flutters up a happy thought, Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:

Since we deserved the name of friends, And thine effect so lives in me, A part of mine may live in thee, And move thee on to noble ends.

You thought my heart too far diseased; You wonder when my fancies play To find me gay among the gay, Like one with any trifle pleased.

The shade by which my life was crost, Which makes a desert in the mind, Has made me kindly with my kind, And like to him whose sight is lost;

Whose feet are guided thro’ the land, Whose jest among his friends is free, Who takes the children on his knee, And winds their curls about his hand:

He plays with threads, he beats his chair For pastime, dreaming of the sky; His inner day can never die, His night of loss is always there.

When on my bed the moonlight falls, I know that in thy place of rest By that broad water of the west, There comes a glory on the walls:

Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name, And o’er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away; From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:

And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, And in the chancel like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.