University of Virginia Library

A Hundred Years! Does that recurring chime
Sound strange to those who “take no note of Time?”
While to the young such slow-returning day
Seems but a seal Time sets upon Decay.

Yea, it hath sealed Decay! From ruined walls,
More hoar, more moss-grown, many a fragment falls;
Churchyards, where once the passionate mourners wept,
Keep but faint trace of where their loved ones slept;
On war-fields, cursed by many a dying groan,
The partridge builds her nest, the corn is sown;
And for fierce clarions of a hostile throng
Lo! children's laughter, and the reaper's song!
Huge forest oaks are gone whose age was told
By palsied grandsires linked with “days of old;”
The windlestrae waves bare where once they stood,
And slender saplings screen a thinner wood.
Change is around us! Change, whose busy spade
Lends the old sexton, Time, his younger aid;
And, with a brisk ambition, buries all
Which Death can silence, or Decay enthrall.
What do they bury? Men. They hide away
Dead hearts, that moulder in the kindred clay;
But something yet survives from sire to son—
Death cannot bury what those men have done.
The holy Creed which vanished lips have taught—
The Freedom which the Patriot's blood hath bought—
The keen invention of some vigorous mind
Which gleaned from Science gifts for all mankind—
The plans Philanthropy at length matured
To lessen griefs by weaker souls endured—
These are not Death's! nor Death's the Poet's Song!
Vainly the centuries shall roll along,
Vainly the generations disappear—
That Life had sap that springs from year to year!
Who strikes one chord of Nature's music true
Fills the void world with echoes ever new:
Men listened who are gone, but still the sound
Gathers the newer generations round;
And the one thought of one man's brief bright morn
Fathers the thoughts of men as yet unborn;
Leaves them a younger life when his departs—
Heritors of his claim on human hearts.

A Hundred Years! When twice that time has sped,
Fresh be the music of the vanished dead!
Could we count up—instead of years—the souls
Which, through such years, poetic power controls,
By vaguest millions could they reckoned be,
Or by thy sands, thou world-encroaching sea?
Count but one Poet—count the myriad throngs
That echo Burns's words, and Burns's songs;
How many hearts have read with honest pride,
That “man's a man” with wealth and rank denied?
How many, woo'd, through him, their “Bonnie Jean?”
How many, mourned their “Mary” in his strain?
How many, lingered o'er the Arcadian light
That made the “Cottar's Saturday” seem bright?
How many, felt with martial ardour filled,
Hearing his “Scots wha hae” by music thrilled?
How many tears have dropped like ocean brine,
When clasping hands have hallowed “Auld Lang Syne?”
We know not! but the thoughts that poets have
(Heaven's part in them) can fill no earthly grave;
Thought is man's soul, and lives beyond his time,
Immortal—even when clothed in simplest rhyme;
Like beacon-fires that shone in days of yore,
Onward they shoot, and gather more and more,
Still waking, as they pass from mind to mind,
An answering light to lights long left behind.
Nor let us murmur that such fire must be
Made of the dead boughs of an earthly tree,
For flickering flames alone to earth are given,
The lights that moveless shine are set in heaven.
Poet and man (not angel), “earth to earth!”
Dead are thy days of sorrow and of mirth;
Dead, the quick passionate heart whose pulse beat full,
In different measure from the cold and dull.
And dead are all thy faults! The reckless jest,
Born of a baffled hope and sad unrest—
Love's wild delights that fevered every vein—
Wit's careless words from an excited brain—
Thirst for the laurel-wreath disdain might grudge—
And warm temptations, which the untempted judge,
Who “know not what's resisted”—these are gone:
Bury their memory 'neath his funeral stone;
Let the long summers seal them in repose;
Let the drear winters blot them with their snows;
And own him one of those great Master-minds,
Set in all stations—made of various kinds—
But howsoever made, raised from our ken
Above the level of more common men.
We are blind judges. He shall judge who lends
The various talents for mysterious ends.
What though perverted sight can quick descry
The mote that blurs a brother's kindling eye?
Enough for us to hope—enough to know
The gift of genius is God's gift below.
In what to us seem wavering sparks, may lurk
Fire that yet glows to do the Maker's work:
And minor discords in the Poet's song
May teach a lesson, though we learn it wrong.

All cannot tread alike who onward climb
Through the wild passes of the untracked Time,
Nor all keep patient heart and patient speech,
While mountain tops still top the heights they reach.
Paths set with flowers some tempted feet delay—
Brakes, rough with thorns, the weaker wanderer stay—
And wistful pauses of discouraged rest
Come to the wisest, bravest, strongest, best,
Who see, with mournful eyes of fond regret,
The “meliora latent,” latent yet.
Enough for us, whatever flaw man sees,
The retrograde is not for feet like these;
The aggregate of thought in sentient man
Hath burst the gloom, and struggled to the van;
And though a varying strength may arm the host,
Their heavenly standard never can be lost.
“Onwards!” is written there in gleams of light;
The watchword of a still unfinished fight,
Whose wrestling strength shall yet prevail, and be
Crowned in heaven's breaking dawn, with victory!

A Hundred Years! When this day comes again,
Scarce one of all now living will remain.
Some infant, born even while I write this rhyme,
Perchance shall linger out that stretch of time,
And all the elder of each meeting throng
Be dead like him—the Master of sweet song!
Within the circuit of those hundred years
Eyes that are weeping shall be sealed from tears;
Hearts that beat now, shall rest—no records tell
The strong temptations under which they fell;
And women's prayers of yearning wild appeal,
To bid the men who “loved” them try to feel,
Shall grate no more; but, garnered up in heaven,
Find gentler answer than on earth was given.
But Master still of Time, dead Burns shall be—
His words still watchwords for the brave and free—
His songs still love songs to the young and fond—
His fame still linking with the time beyond.
Much hath been lost within the vanished years,
But not his power o'er human smiles and tears;
And when the Hundredth Year again returns,
More shall be lost—but not the name of Burns.