The distance that divided her from ill: Earth sentient seems again as when of old

The horny foot of Pan Stamped, and the conscious horror ran Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold:

Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe

From underground of our night-mantled foe:

The flame-winged feet Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod

run

Through briny abysses dreamless of the

sun,

Are mercilessly fleet, And at a bound annihilate Ocean's prerogative of short reprieve; Surely ill news might wait, And man be patient of delay to grieve: Letters have sympathies

And tell-tale faces that reveal, To senses finer than the eyes, Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;

They wind a sorrow round with circum

stance

To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace

And some scant use of language taught, steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust. Tells only what he must,

2.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,

I scanned the festering news we half despise

Yet scramble for no less, And read of public scandal, private fraud,

Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,

Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,
And all the unwholesome mess
The Land of Honest Abraham serves of
late

To teach the Old World how to
wait,

When suddenly, As happens if the brain, from overweight

Of blood, infect the eye, Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, And recled commingling: Agassiz is dead.

As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,

An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far, Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,

And strove the present to recall, As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall

3.

Uprooted is our mountain oak, That promised long security of shade And brooding-place for many a winged thought;

Not by Time's softly-cadenced stroke With pauses of relenting pity stayed, But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,

From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught

And in his broad maturity betrayed!

4.

Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,
O mountains woods and streams,
To help us mourn him, for ye loved him
too;

But simpler moods befit our modern
themes,

And no less perfect birth of nature can, Though they yearn tow'rd him, sympathize with man,

Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall;

Answer ye rather to my call, Strong poets of a more unconscious day, When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why,

Too much for softer arts forgotten since That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince,

And drown in music the heart's bitter cry!

Lead me some steps in your directer way,

Teach me those words that strike a solid root

Within the ears of men; Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben,

For he was masculine from head to heel.
Nay, let himself stand undiminished by
With those clear parts of him that will
not die.

Himself from out the recent dark I claim
To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame;
To show himself, as still I seem to see,
A mortal, built upon the antique plan,
Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran,
And taking life as simply as a tree!
To claim my foiled good-bye let him ap-
pear,

Large-limbed and human as I saw him

near.

Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame:

And let me treat him largely: I should fear,

(If with too prying lens I chanced to err, Mistaking catalogue for character,) His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame.

Nor would I scant him with judicial breath

And turn mere critic in an epitaph;
I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff
That swells fame living, chokes it after
death,

And would but memorize the shining half

Of his large nature that was turned to

me:

Fain had I joined with those that honored him

With eyes that darkened because his were dim,

And now been silent: but it might not be.

II. 1.

In some the genius is a thing apart,

A pillared hermit of the brain, Hoarding with incommunicable art

Its intellectual gain;

Man's web of circumstance and fate They from their perch of self observe,

Indifferent as the figures on a slate

Are to the planet's sun-swung curve Whose bright returns they calculate; Their nice adjustment, part to part, Were shaken from its serviceable mood By unpremeditated stirs of heart

Or jar of human neighborhood: Some find their natural selves, and only then,

In furloughs of divine escape from men, And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare,

Driven by some instinct of desire, They wander worldward, 't is to blink and stare,

Like wild things of the wood about a fire,

Dazed by the social glow they cannot share;

His nature brooked no lonely lair, But basked and bourgeoned in copart