Ii

1.

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names They should eternize, but the place Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims, That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames. This insubstantial world and fleet Seems solid for a moment when we stand On dust ennobled by heroic feet Once mighty to sustain a tottering land, And mighty still such burthen to upbear, Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were: Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot, Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot, No more a pallid image and a dream, But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

2.

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint To raise long-buried days from tombs of print; 'Here stood he,' softly we repeat, And lo, the statue shrined and still In that gray minster-front we call the Past, Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill, Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit. It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last, Its features human with familiar light, A man, beyond the historian's art to kill, Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.

3.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought Into the seamless tapestry of thought. So charmed, with undeluded eye we see In history's fragmentary tale Bright clues of continuity, Learn that high natures over Time prevail, And feel ourselves a link in that entail That binds all ages past with all that are to be.