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By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,

260 Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's

sweep

Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill,
And steeped in doom familiar field and hill, -
New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,
November nature with a name of May,

265 Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep, While the orchards mocked us in their white ar

ray,

And building robins wondered at our tears,

Snatched in his prime, the shape august

That should have stood unbent 'neath fourscore

years,

270 The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,

All gone to speechless dust;

And he our passing guest,

Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest,
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,
275 Who brought ripe Oxford's culture to our board,
The Past's incalculable hoard,

Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,
Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet
With immemorial lisp of musing feet;

280 Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar's,
Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,
Poet in all that poets have of best,

But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims.
Who now hath found sure rest,

272. Arthur Hugh Clough, an English poet, author of the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and editor of Dryden's Transla. tion of Plutarch's Lives, who came to this country in 1852 with some purpose of making it his home, but returned to England in less than a year. He lived while here in Cambridge, and strong attachments grew up between him and the men of letters in Cambridge and Concord.

285 Not by still Isis or historic Thames,

Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me, But, not misplaced, by Arno's hallowed brim, Nor scorned by Santa Croce's neighboring fames, Haply not mindless, wheresoe'er he be, 290 Of violets that to-day I scattered over him ; He, too, is there,

After the good centurion fitly named,

Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,
Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,

295 Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,

Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.

300

305

6.

Yea truly, as the sallowing years

Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves
Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,
And that unwakened winter nears,
'Tis the void chair our surest guests receives,
'Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,
'Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;
We count our rosary by the beads we miss :
To me, at least, it seemeth so,

An exile in the land once found divine,

While my starved fire burns low,

287. Clough died in his forty-third year, November 13, 1861, and was buried in the little Protestant cemetery outside the walls of Florence.

288. Santa Croce is the church in Florence where many illustrious dead are buried, among them Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Alfieri.

291. Cornelius Conway Felton Professor of Greek Language and Literature in Harvard College, and afterward President until his death in 1862.

And homeless winds at the loose casement whine
Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

IV.

1.

310 Now forth into the darkness all are gone,
But memory, still unsated, follows on,
Retracing step by step our homeward waik,
With many a laugh among our serious talk,
Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,
315 The long red streamers from the windows glide,
Or the dim western moon

Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon,
And Boston shows a soft Venetian side
In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,
320 Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;
Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide
Shivered the winter stars, while all below,
As if an end were come of human ill,

The world was wrapt in innocence of snow 325 And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;

These were our poetry; in him perhaps
Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,
And he would rather count the perch and bream
Than with the current's idle fancy lapse;

330 And yet he had the poet's open eye
That takes a frank delight in all it sees,
Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky,
To him the life-long friend of fields and trees:

315. In walking over West Boston bridge at night one sees the lights from the houses on Beacon Street reflected in the water below and seeming to make one long light where flam. and reflection join.

Then came the prose of the suburban street, 335 Its silence deepened by our echoing feet,

And converse such as rambling hazard finds;
Then he who many cities knew and many minds
And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian
forms

Of misty memory, bade them live anew

340 As when they shared earth's manifold delight, In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true, And, with an accent heightening as he warms, Would stop forgetful of the shortening night, Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse 345 Much wordly wisdom kept for others' use, Not for his own, for he was rash and free, His purse or knowledge all men's, like the sea. Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might (With pauses broken, while the fitful spark 350 He blew more hotly rounded on the dark To hint his features with a Rembrandt light) Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck, Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many more

Whom he had seen, or knew from others' sight, 355 And make them men to me as ne'er before:

337. See note to p. 373, 1. 230.

338. Ossian was a fabulous Celtic warrior poet known chiefly through the pretended poems of Ossian of James MacPherson who lived in Scotland the latter half of the eighteenth century. There has been much controversy over the exact relation of Macpherson to the poems, which are Scotch crags looming out of Scotch mists.

352. Naturalists of renown. Oken was a remarkable and eccentric Swiss naturalist, 1779-1851; Humboldt a great naturalist and traveller, known by his Kosmos, 1769-1859; Lamarck, 1744-1829; Cuvier, in some respects the father of modern clas sification, and Agassiz's teacher, 1769-1832; all these were personally known to Agassiz.

Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea, German or French thrust by the lagging word, For a good leash of mother-tongues had he. 360 At last, arrived at where our paths divide, "Good night!" and, ere the distance grew too wide,

"Good night!" again; and now with cheated ear I half hear his who mine shall never hear.

2.

Sometimes it seemed as if New England air
365 For his large lungs too parsimonious were,
As if those empty rooms of dogma drear
Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere
Counting the horns o'er of the Beast,
Still scaring those whose faith in it is least,
370 As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere
That sharpen all the needles of the East,
Had been to him like death,

Accustomed to draw Europe's freer breath
In a more stable element;

375 Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,
Our practical horizon grimly pent,

380

Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze,
Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close,
Our social monotone of level days,

Might make our best seem banishment,
But it was nothing so;
Haply his instinct might divine,
Beneath our drift of puritanic snow,
The marvel sensitive and fine

385 Of sanguinaria overrash to blow

And warm its shyness in an air benign;

Well might he prize truth's warranty and pledge

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