University of Virginia Library

ALBERT F. WEBSTER, JR.

(Died at sea, Dec. 27, 1876.)

Like a dreary wanderer, from the West,
This tale of your lonely death departs,
And finding those who have loved you best,
Knocks loud at the doorway of their hearts!

Our fears had faded; our hope re-bloomed;
You had cheered us happily from afar;
Your danger seemed from the life it gloomed
To pass like a cloud from the morning-star!

But yearning still for the sun that shines
With a richer gladness on summer calms,
You sailed from the dark balsamic pines
For blue Oceania's island-palms!

But while you were sailing, brief and stern
Came the solemn summons that none can brave,
And now you rest, as in grief we learn,
With the vast Pacific for your grave!

O friend, endowed with a worth so rare,
Whom intellect served, whom truth obeyed,
O forehead so chastely, brightly fair
With the shining aureole genius made!

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137

What fatal irony follows man
With a curse no wisdom hath understood,
And reels amid nature's ordered plan
Like a drunken faun through a peaceful wood?

Should life, in its meagre and troublous term,
Be marred by mockeries harsh as those
That set in the leaf's young green a worm,
That kill in the bud its waiting rose?

That smite the lark as its wings unfold
In the dawn whose thrilling dews they crave,
That shatter the column ere it hold
The sculptured grace of its architrave?

Ah, proud philosophy, shut thy book!
Art thou better, for all thy boasted might,
Than a little child, when it turns its look
On the silver labyrinths of the night?

Ah, haughty science, whose hand can weigh
The monstrous planet in mighty skies,
Thou hast not strength in thine arm, this day,
To tear the bandage from off thine eyes!