University of Virginia Library

It is appointed unto man to die.
Where Life is Death is, dominating Life,
Wresting the sceptre from its feeble grasp,
And trampling on its dust. From the first hour
When the first child upon its mother's breast
Lay heavily, with no breath on its cold lips,
To the last hour when the last man shall die,
And the race be extinct—Death never came,
Nor ever will come, without apprehension.
The dying may be ready to depart,
For sleep and death are one to them; but we
Who love them, and survive them—unto whom
The places they once filled are filled no more,
For whom a light has gone out of the sun,
A shadow fallen on noonday, unto us,
Who love our dead, Death always comes too soon,
A consternation, and a lamentation,
The sorrow of all sorrows, till in turn
We follow them, and others mourn for us.

This tragic lesson of mortality
The Master who hath left us learned in youth,
When the Muse found him wandering by the stream
That sparkled, singing, at his father's door—
The first Muse whom the New World, loving long,
Wooed in the depths of her old solitude.
The green, untrodden, world-wide wilderness
Surrendered to the soul of this young man
The secret of its silence. Centuries passed;
The red man chased the deer, and tracked the bear
To his high mountain den—but he came not.
The white man followed; the great woods were felled,
And in the clearings cottage smokes arose,
And fields were white with harvests: he came not.
The New World waited for him, and the words
Which should disburden the dumb mystery
That darkened its strange life, when summer days
Steeped the green boughs with light, and winter nights
Looked down like Death upon the dead, old world;
For what was Earth but the great tomb of man,
And suns and planets but sepulchral urns
Filled with the awful ashes of the Past?

Such was the first sad message to mankind
Of this young poet, who was never young,
So heavily the old burden of the Earth
Weighed on his soul from boyhood. Yet not less,
Not less, but more he loved her; for if she
Was sombre with her secret she was still
Beautiful as a goddess; and if he
Should one day look upon her face no more,
He would not cease to look till that day came:
For he for life was dedicate to her,
The inspiration of his earliest song,
The happy memory of his sterner years,
The consolation of his ripe, old age.
What she was to the eyes of lesser men,
Which only glance at the rough husk of things,
She never was to him;—but day and night
A loveliness, a might, a mystery,
A Presence never wholly understood,
The broken shadow of some unknown Power,
Which overflows all forms, but is not Form—
The inscrutable Spirit of the Universe!
High-priest whose temple was the woods, he felt
Their melancholy grandeur, and the awe
That ancientness and solitude beget,
Strange intimations of invisible things,
Which, while they seem to sadden, give delight,
And hurt not, but persuade the soul to prayer:
For, silent in the barren ways of men,
Under green roofs of overhanging boughs,
Where the Creator's hands are never stayed,
The soul recovers her forgotten speech,
The lost religion of her infancy.

Nature hath sacred seasons of her own,
And reverent poets to interpret them.
But she hath other singers, unto whom
The twinkle of a dew-drop in the grass,
The sudden singing of an unseen bird,
The pensive brightness of the evening star,
Are revelations of a loveliness
For which there is no language known to man,
Except the eloquent language of the eye,
Hushed with the fullness of her happiness.
What may be known of these recondite things
Our grave, sweet poet knew: for unto him
The Goddess of the Earth revealed herself
As to no other poet of the time,
Save only him who slumbers at Grasmere,
His Brother,—not his Master. From the hour
When first he wandered by his native stream
To crop the violets growing on its banks,
And list to the brown thrasher's vernal hymn,
To the last hour of his long, honored life,
He never faltered in his love of Nature.
Recluse with men, her dear society,
Welcome at all times, savored of content,
Brightened his happy moments, and consoled
His hours of gloom. A student of the woods
And of the fields, he was their calendar,
Knew when the first pale wind-flower would appear,
And when the last wild-fowl would take its flight;
Where the cunning squirrel had his granary,
And where the industrious bee had stored her sweets.
Go where he would, he was not solitary,
Flowers nodded gayly to him, wayside brooks
Slipped by him laughingly, while the emulous birds
Showered lyric raptures that provoked his own.
The winds were his companions on the hills—
The clouds, and thunders—and the glorious Sun,
Whose bright beneficence sustains the world,
A visible symbol of the Omnipotent,
Whom not to worship were to be more blind
Than those of old who worshipped stocks and stones.

Who loves and lives with Nature tolerates
Baseness in nothing; high and solemn thoughts
Are his, clean deeds and honorable life.
If he be poet, as our Master was,
His song will be a mighty argument,
Heroic in its structure to support
The weight of the world forever! All great things
Are native to it, as the Sun to Heaven.
Such was thy song, O Master! and such fame
As only the kings of thought receive, is thine;
Be happy with it in thy larger life
Where Time is not, and the sad word—Farewell!