Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food,
One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.

III

Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil
Amid the dust of books to find her,

Content at last, for guerdon of their toil,

With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.
Many in sad faith sought for her,

Many with crossed hands sighed for her;
But these, our brothers, fought for her,
At life's dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her,
Tasting the raptured fleetness
Of her divine completeness:

Their higher instinct knew

Those love her best who to themselves are true,
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;
They followed her and found her

Where all may hope to find,

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind,
But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.
Where faith made whole with deed

Breathes its awakening breath

• Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed,

With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

IV

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides

Into the silent hollow of the past;

What is there that abides

COMMEMORATION ODE

To make the next age better for the last?

Is earth too poor to give us

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Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we see

From doubt is never free;

The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;

With our laborious hiving

What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,
Only secure in every one's conniving,

A long account of nothings paid with loss,
Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.
But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our likeness still we shape our fate.
Ah, there is something here

Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer,
Something that gives our feeble light
A high immunity from Night,

Something that leaps life's narrow bars

To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
A seed of sunshine that can leaven

Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,
And glorify our clay

With light from fountains elder than the Day;

A conscience more divine than we,
A gladness fed with secret tears,
A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,

Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,

Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate

years.

V

Whither leads the path
To ampler fates that leads?

Not down through flowery meads,
To reap an aftermath

Of youth's vainglorious weeds,

But up the steep, amid the wrath

And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
Where the world's best hope and stay
By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way,
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.
Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,

Ere yet the sharp, decisive word

Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword
Dreams in its easeful sheath;

But some day the live coal behind the thought,
Whether from Baäl's stone obscene,

Or from the shrine serene

Of God's pure altar brought,

Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen
Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,
And, helpless in the fiery passion caught,
Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men:
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed

COMMEMORATION ODE

Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,

And cries reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;
Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,
The victim of thy genius, not its mate!"
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
Limbed like the old heroic breeds,

Who stand self-poised on manhood's solid earth,
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

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VI

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,
With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief:
Forgive me, if from present things I turn

To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.
Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man

Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,

Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

They knew that outward grace is dust;
They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,
And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapor's blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface

And thwart her genial will;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to

face.

I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory