Vi

1.

I seem to see the black procession go: That crawling prose of death too well I know, The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe; I see it wind through that unsightly grove, Once beautiful, but long defaced With granite permanence of cockney taste And all those grim disfigurements we love: There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste Nature rebels at: and it is not true Of those most precious parts of him we knew: Could we be conscious but as dreamers be, 'Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity; Nay, to be mingled with the elements, The fellow-servants of creative powers, Partaker in the solemn year's events, To share the work of busy-fingered hours, To be night's silent almoner of dew, To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the ocean caverns through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all-disconsolate; Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod Of charitable earth That takes out all our mortal stains, And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod, Methinks were better worth Than the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains, The heart's insatiable ache: But such was not his faith, Nor mine: it may be he had trod Outside the plain old path of God thus spake, But God to him was very God And not a visionary wraith Skulking in murky corners of the mind, And he was sure to be Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, Not with His essence mystically combined, As some high spirits long, but whole and free, A perfected and conscious Agassiz. And such I figure him: the wise of old Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold, Not truly with the guild enrolled Of him who seeking inward guessed Diviner riddles than the rest, And groping in the darks of thought Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; Rather he shares the daily light, From reason's charier fountains won, Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

2.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled heap, A cairn which every science helped to build, Unvalued will its golden secrets keep: He knows at last if Life or Death be best: Wherever he be flown, whatever vest The being hath put on which lately here So many-friended was, so full of cheer To make men feel the Seeker's noble zest, We have not lost him all; he is not gone To the dumb herd of them that wholly die; The beauty of his better self lives on In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye He trained to Truth's exact severity; He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him Whose living word still stimulates the air? In endless file shall loving scholars come The glow of his transmitted touch to share, And trace his features with an eye less dim Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes dumb.