5 With sure impulsion to keep honor clear,

When, pointing down, his father whispers," Here,
Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely Great,
Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,

Then nameless, now a power and mixed with
fate."

Io Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust,
Once known to men as pious, learnèd, just,
And one memorial pile that dares to last;
But Memory greets with reverential kiss
No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,
15 Touched by that modest glory as it past,
O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed
These hundred years its monumental shade.

2.

Of our swift passage through this scenery Of life and death, more durable than we, 20 What landmark so congenial as a tree Repeating its green legend every spring, And, with a yearly ring,

Recording the fair seasons as they flee,

Type of our brief but still-renewed mortality? 25 We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains, Builded with costly juice of hearts and brains Gone to the mould now, whither all that be Vanish returnless, yet are procreant still In human lives to come of good or ill, 3 And feed unseen the roots of Destiny.

12. Memorial Hall, built by the alumni of Harvard, in memory of those who fell in the war for union, a building of more serious thought than any in Cambridge, and among the few in the country built to endure.

II.

1.

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names
They should eternize, but the place

Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace
Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their
fames

35 Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims,

That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames.

This insubstantial world and fleet

Seems solid for a moment when we stand

40 On dust ennobled by heroic feet

Once mighty to sustain a tottering land,

And mighty still such burthen to upbear,

Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely

were:

Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot,
45 Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream
Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot,
No more a pallid image and a dream,
But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

2.

Our grosser minds need this terrestial hint 50 To raise long-buried days from tombs of print: "Here stood he," softly we repeat,

And lo, the statue shrined and still

In that gray minster-front we call the Past,
Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill,

55 Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit. It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last,