When youth was lord of my unchallenged fate,
And time seemed but the vassal of my will,
I entertainëd certain guests of state—
The great of older days, who, faithful still,
Have kept with me the pact my youth had made.
And I remember how one galleon rare
From the far distance of a time long dead
Came on the wings of a fair-fortuned air...
His tongue was touched with sacred fire,
He could not rest, he must speak out,
When Liberty lay stabbed, and doubt
Stalked through the night in vestments dire,—
When slaves uplifted manacled hands,
Praying in agony and despair,
And answer came not anywhere,
But gloom through all the stricken lands,—
His voice for...
The actor’s dead, and memory alone
Recalls the genial magic of his tone;
Marble nor canvas nor the printed page
Shall tell his genius to another age:
A memory, doomed to dwindle less and less,
His world-wide fame shrinks to this littleness.
Yet if, a half a century from to-day,
A tender smile about our old lips play,
And if our...
On His Birthday, 27th February, 1867
I NEED not praise the sweetness of his song,
Where limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds
Smooth as our Charles, when, fearing lest he wrong
The new moon’s mirrored skiff, he slides along,
Full without noise, and whispers in his reeds.
With loving breath of all the winds his name
Is blown about...
His tongue was touched with sacred fire,
He could not rest, he must speak out,
When Liberty lay stabbed, and doubt
Stalked through the night in vestments dire,—
When slaves uplifted manacled hands,
Praying in agony and despair,
And answer came not anywhere,
But gloom through all the stricken lands,—
His voice for...
