University of Virginia Library

DEACON GEORGE W. CHIPMAN, AT SEVENTY.

'T is fitting thus to honor the man of threescore years and ten,
Who has fulfilled his mission nobly among the sons of men,—
Like a warrior, safe returning from a hundred well-fought fields,
Like a reaper, with his arms full of the sheaves good tillage yields.

Some silver hairs are creeping, one by one, among the brown;
'T is always so when the angels set to weaving glory's crown,

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Like the great sun in heaven, when it nears the horizon's rim;
Nor is his natural force abridged, nor his peerless sight grown dim.

So a tall cathedral pillar, planted firm by ancient hands,
So a tree amid the forest, braving storm and tempest, stands;
So the lighthouse, sending forth its rays across the billowy foam,
Unmoved while the generations pass, guides many a pilgrim home.

Where are the children he once knew? Methinks the birds are flown,—
The lisping girls are matrons; the boys, gray-beard men are grown;
The old nests, or others like them, on the old branches hang,
And the younger broods still warble as the birds of old time sang;
And the eye that saw, the voice that led, the heart that loved their trill,
Though fifty springs have vanished, sees them, leads them, loves them, still.
How the many earlier reapers from the field of toil have passed,
And memory round their absent forms has its mantle of glory cast!
They passed as the twilight passes into the noontide ray,
As the morning star is melted in the light of glowing day.

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The pastors whom he loved and helped,—some still reap earth's harvests white;
Some, glorified, walk with the Lamb on high, in raiment of dazzling light.
Thank God, as suns at setting shed their glow on each purple hill,
One orb, that shone at morn and noon, in its brightness lingers still.
A Nestor, in the field he tilled, we cannot think him old!
No ice has chilled his tropic heart, no rust forms on the gold.