And crown you with our welcome as with flowers! How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! Aladdin's Lamp, and Fortunatus' Purse, 70 That holds the treasures of the universe! All possibilities are in its hands, No danger daunts it, and no foe withstands; In its sublime audacity of faith, 'Be thou removed!" it to the mountain saith, And with ambitious feet, secure and proud, Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud! As ancient Priam at the Scæan gate Sat on the walls of Troy in regal state With the old men, too old and weak to fight, Chirping like grasshoppers in their delight To see the embattled hosts, with spear and shield, 80 Of Trojans and Achaians in the field; Atreides, Menelaus, Odysseus, Let him not boast who puts his armor on 90 Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel. veyed Distorted in a fountain as she played; The unlucky Marsyas found it, and his fate Was one to make the bravest hesitate. Write on your doors the saying wise and old, 100 'Be bold! be bold!' and everywhere, 'Be bold; Be not too bold!' Yet better the excess And now, my classmates; ye remaining few I 10 And summons us together once again, Where are the others? Voices from the deep Caverns of darkness answer me: They sleep!' I name no names; instinctively I feel The discord in the harmonies of life! But why, you ask me, should this tale be told To men grown old, or who are growing old? When each had numbered more than four Cut off from labor by the failing light; Something remains for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear; Not Edipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode, Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn, 280 But other something, would we but begin; For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. 1874. 1875. THE HERONS OF ELMWOOD1 WARM and still is the summer night, As here by the river's brink I wander; White overhead are the stars, and white The glimmering lamps on the hillside yonder. ''Elmwood' was the home of James Russell Lowell in Cambridge, about a half mile distant from the Long fellow home. IN THE CHURCHYARD AT TARRYTOWN1 HERE lies the gentle humorist, who died How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death! O YE dead Poets, who are living still From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head, Ye were not glad your errand to fulfil? 1876. NATURE As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Still gazing at them through the open door, 1 The burial-place of Washington Irving. On Longfellow's great admiration for Irving, see the Life, vol i, p. 12. The second of desire, the third of thought; This is the lore a Spanish monk, distraught With dreams and visions, was the first to teach. These Silences, commingling each with each, Made up the perfect Silence that he sought And prayed for, and wherein at times he caught Mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach. O thou, whose daily life anticipates The spiritual world preponderates, 1877. WAPENTAKE & TO ALFRED TENNYSON POET! I come to touch thy lance with mine; Not as a knight, who on the listed field 2 Written for Whittier's seventieth birthday. 3 When any came to take the government of the Hundred or Wapentake in a day and place appointed, as they were accustomed to meete, all the better sort met him with lances, and he alighting from his horse, all rise up to him, and he setting or holding his lance upright, all the rest come with their lances, according to the auncient custome in confirming league and publike peace and obedience, and touch his lance or wea pon, and thereof called Wapentake, for the Saxon of |