Life up-gathers carks and cares, So good-by to maid and lover! Find three gray hairs, And cry, "All 's over!" Look at Browning! How he keeps That never sleeps — Still an art Full of youth's own grit and power, Thoughts we deemed to boys belonging; The springtime's flower Love-and-longing. TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND WITH EMERSON'S "POEMS' EDMUND, in this book you'll find Have no better gift to give. When no more is silver mill, Golden stream, or iron hill Search the New World from pole to pole, Here you'll find its singing soul! OUR ELDER POETS 139 OUR ELDER POETS (1878) HE is gone! We shall not see again And words that poured like molten rocks. He is gone, and we who thought him cold And know that stolid form did hold He is gone, but other bards remain And he of the wise and mellow art. And he who first to Science sought, Who learned a secret never taught— The knowledge of men's tears and laughter. He also in whose music rude Our peopled hills and prairies speak, Resounding, in his modern mood, The tragic fury of the Greek. And he, too, lingers round about The darling city of his birth- Find scarce one peer in all the earth. LONGFELLOW'S "BOOK OF SONNETS" 'T WAS Sunday evening as I wandered down Of silence smiles, I heard the chimes of Grace" brown. To-day, again, I past along Broadway In the fierce tumult and mid-noise of noon, For as I walked I read the poet's book. "H. H." I WOULD that in the verse she loved some word, Not all unfit, I to her praise might frame Some word wherein the memory of her name Should through long years its incense still afford. But no, her spirit smote with its own sword; Herself has lit the fire whose blood-red flame Shall not be quenched - this is her living fame Who struck so well the sonnet's subtile chord. None who e'er knew her can believe her dead; Tho' should she die they deem it well might be Her spirit took its everlasting flight In summer's glory, by the sunset sea That onward through the Golden Gate it fled. THE MODERN RHYMER 141 THE MODERN RHYMER I Now you who rhyme, and I who rhyme, And birds that sing, and winds that blow, That moved before Will Shakespeare's eyes; Go to! our spirits shall not be laid, Can make a poet sing and dream; II Beneath the false moon's pallid glare, Sweet Shakespeare was not known to you! You saw the ocean from the shore; Through mid-seas now our ship doth roar A wild, new, teeming world of men That wakens in the poet's brain Thoughts, that were never thought before, O million-centuried thoughts that make |