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;
So from the snowy summits of our years
We see you in the plain, as each appears,
And question of you; asking, Who is he
That towers above the others? Which
may be

Atreides, Menelaus, Odysseus,
Ajax the great, or bold Idomeneus ?'

Let him not boast who puts his armor on 90
As he who puts it off, the battle done.
Study yourselves; and most of all note
well

Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel.
Not every blossom ripens into fruit;
Minerva, the inventress of the flute,
Flung it aside, when she her face sur-

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
Than the defect; better the more than less;
Better like Hector in the field to die,
Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly.

And now, my classmates; ye remaining few
That number not the half of those we knew,
Ye, against whose familiar names not yet
The fatal asterisk of death is set,
Ye I salute! The horologe of Time
Strikes the half-century with a solemn
chime,

I 10

And summons us together once again,
The joy of meeting not unmixed with pain.

Where are the others? Voices from the deep

Caverns of darkness answer me: They sleep!'

I name no names; instinctively I feel
Each at some well-remembered grave will

The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is
pain!

But why, you ask me, should this tale be told

To men grown old, or who are growing old?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles 240
Wrote his grand Edipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his com-
peers,

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
In the bright Indian Summer of his fame!
A simple stone, with but a date and name,
Marks his secluded resting-place beside
The river that he loved and glorified.
Here in the autumn of his days he came,
But the dry leaves of life were all aflame
With tints that brightened and were multi-
plied.

How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summers full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.

O YE dead Poets, who are living still
Immortal in your verse, though life be fled,
And ye, O living Poets, who are dead
Though ye are living, if neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
With drops of anguish falling fast and
red

From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,

Ye were not glad your errand to fulfil?
Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
Have something in them so divinely sweet,
It can assuage the bitterness of wrong;
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
(1878.)

1876.

NATURE

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the
floor,

Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,

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 life to come, and in whose thought and
word

The spiritual world preponderates,
Hermit of Amesbury! thou too hast heard
Voices and melodies from beyond the gates,
And speakest only when thy soul is stirred!
(1878.)

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