Three Memorial Poems

'Coscienza fusca O della propria o dell' altrui vergogna Pur sentirà la tua parola brusca.'

If I let fall a word of bitter mirth When public shames more shameful pardon won, Some have misjudged me, and my service done, If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth: Through veins that drew their life from Western earth Two hundred years and more my blood hath run In no polluted course from sire to son; And thus was I predestined ere my birth To love the soil wherewith my fibres own Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego The son's right to a mother dearer grown With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.

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To

E.L. GODKIN,

IN CORDIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS EMINENT SERVICE IN HEIGHTENING AND PURIFYING THE TONE OF OUR POLITICAL THOUGHT,

These Three Poems

ARE DEDICATED.

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*** Readers, it is hoped, will remember that, by his Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, the author had precluded himself from many of the natural outlets of thought and feeling common to such occasions as are celebrated in these poems.