Ode Recited At The Harvard Commemoration July 21, 1865

Weak-Winged is Song,

Nor aims at that clear-ethered height

Whither the brave deed climbs for light

We seem to do them wrong,

Bringing our robin's-leaf to deck their hearse

Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse.

Our trivial song to honor those who come

With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum.

And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire

Live battle-odes whose lines mere steel and fire:

Yet sometimes feathered words are strong,

A gracious memory to buoy up and save

From Lethe's dreamless ooze, the common grave

Of the unventurous throng.

Many loved Truth, and lavished Life's best oil

Amid the dust of books to find her,

Content at last, for guerdon of their toil,

With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.

Many in sad faith sought for her,

Many with crossed hands sighed for her;

But these, our brothers, fought for her,

At life's dear peril wrought for her,

So loved her that they died for her,

Tasting the raptured fleetness

Of her divine completeness

Their higher instinct knew

Those love her best who to themselves are true,

And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;

They followed her and found her

Where all may hope to find,

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind,

But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.

Where faith made whole with deed

Breathes its awakening breath

Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed,

With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides

Into the silent hollow of the past;

What is there that abides

To make the next age better for the last?

Is earth too poor to give us

Something to live for here that shall outlive us?

Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with

Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we sec:

From doubt is never free;

The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;

With our laborious hiving

What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,

Only secure in every one's conniving,

A long account of nothings paid with loss,

Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,

After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires,

Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,

Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.

But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,

Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,

For in our likeness still we shape our fate.

Whither leads the path

To ampler fates that leads?

Not down through flowery meads,

To reap an aftermath

Of youth's vainglorious weeds,

But up the steep, amid the wrath

And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,

Where the world's best hope and stay

By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way,

And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.

Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,

Ere yet the sharp, decisive word

Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword

Dreams in its easeful sheath;

But some day the live coal behind the thought,

Whether from Baal's stone obscene,

Or from the shrine serene

Of God's pure altar brought,

Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen

Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,

And, helpless in the fiery passion caught,

Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men

Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed

Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,

And trips reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise,

And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;

I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;

Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,

The victim of thy genius, not its mate!"

Life may be given in many ways,

And loyalty to Truth be sealed

As bravely in the closet as the field,

So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,

When craven churls deride her,

To front a lie in arms and not to yield,

This shows, methinks, God's plan

And measure of a stalwart man,

Limbed like the old heroic breeds,

Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,

With ashes on her head,

wept with the passion of an angry grief.

Forgive me, if from present things I turn

To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,

And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.

Nature, they say, doth dote,

And cannot make a man

Save on some worn-out plan,

Repeating us by rote

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,

Vise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,

Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;

One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,

Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,

And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

They knew that outward grace is dust;

They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,

Thrusting to thin air o er our cloudy bars,

A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;

Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,

Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,

Ere any names of Serf and Peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface

And thwart her genial will;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory

Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,

Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums,

Disturb our judgment for the hour,

But at last silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame,

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

New birth of our new soil, the first American.