To Holmes

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.

Dear Wendell, why need count the years Since first your genius made me thrill, If what moved then to smiles or tears, Or both contending, move me still?

What has the Calendar to do With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth With gay immortals such as you Whose years but emphasize your youth?

One air gave both their lease of breath; The same paths lured our boyish feet; One earth will hold us safe in death, With dust of saints and scholars sweet.

Our legends from one source were drawn, I scarce distinguish yours from mine, And don’t we make the Gentiles yawn With “You remembers?” o’er our wine!

If I, with too senescent air, Invade your elder memory’s pale, You snub me with a pitying “Where Were you in the September Gale?”

Both stared entranced at Lafayette, Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet As scarcely worth one’s while to see.

Ten years my senior, when my name In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ, Her halls still echoed with the fame Of you, her poet and her wit.

’Tis fifty years from then to now: But your Last Leaf renews its green, Though, for the laurels on your brow (So thick they crowd), ’tis hardly seen.

The oriole’s fledglings fifty times Have flown from our familiar elms; As many poets with their rhymes Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms.

The birds are hushed, the poets gone Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach, And still your wingëd brood sing on To all who love our English speech.

Nay, let the foolish records be That make believe you’re seventy-five: You’re the old Wendell still to me,-- And that’s the youngest man alive.

The gray-blue eyes, I see them still, The gallant front with brown o’erhung, The shape alert, the wit at will, The phrase that stuck, but never stung.

You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs, Whose gaunt line my horizon hems, Though twilight all the lowland blurs, Hold sunset in their ruddy stems.

You with the elders? Yes, ’tis true, But in no sadly literal sense, With elders and coevals too, Whose verb admits no preterite tense.

Master alike in speech and song Of fame’s great antiseptic--Style, You with the classic few belong Who tempered wisdom with a smile.

Outlive us all! Who else like you Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, And make us with the pen we knew Deathless at least in epitaph?

WOLLASTON, August 29, 1884.

IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue, When Contemplation tells her pensive beads Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new. Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!

The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel, Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl, Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON’S “OLD WORLD IDYLLS.”

I.

At length arrived, your book I take To read in for the author’s sake; Too gray for new sensations grown, Can charm to Art or Nature known This torpor from my senses shake?

Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake? Is a thrush gurgling from the brake? Has Spring, on all the breezes blown, At length arrived?

Long may you live such songs to make, And I to listen while you wake, With skill of late disused, each tone Of the Lesboum barbiton, At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived.

II.

As I read on, what changes steal O’er me and through, from head to heel? A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside, My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,-- Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele!

Down vistas long of clipt charmille Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; Tabor and pipe the dancers guide As I read on.

While in and out the verses wheel The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal, Lithe ankles that to music glide, But chastely and by chance descried; Art? Nature? Which do I most feel As I read on?