You may talk of your BURKES and your GIBBONS so clever,

But I hark back to him with a "JOHNSON for ever!"

And I feel as I muse on his ponderous figure, Tho' he's great in this age, in the next he'll grow

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

"NOT

"Nec turpem senectam

Degere, nec cithara carentem.”

-HOR. i. 31.

OT to be tuneless in old age!"
Ah! surely blest his pilgrimage,

Who, in his Winter's snow,

Still sings with note as sweet and clear

As in the morning of the year

When the first violets blow!

Blest!-but more blest, whom Summer's heat, Whom Spring's impulsive stir and beat,

Have taught no feverish lure; Whose Muse, benignant and serene, Still keeps his Autumn chaplet green Because his verse is pure!

Lie calm, O white and laureate head!
Lie calm, O Dead, that art not dead,
Since from the voiceless grave,

Thy voice shall speak to old and young
While song yet speaks an English tongue
By Charles' or Thamis' wave!

CHARLES GEORGE GORDON

"RATHER be dead than praised," he said,

That hero, like a hero dead,

In this slack-sinewed age endued
With more than antique fortitude!

"Rather be dead than praised!" Shall we, Who loved thee, now that Death sets free Thine eager soul, with word and line Profane that empty house of thine?

Our pain

Nay, let us hold, be mute.
Will not be less that we refrain;
And this our silence shall but be
A larger monument to thee.

VICTOR HUGO

HE set the trumpet to his lips, and lo!

The clash of waves, the roar of winds that

blow,

The strife and stress of Nature's warring things, Rose like a storm cloud, upon angry wings.

He set the reed pipe to his lips, and lo!
The wreck of landscape took a rosy glow,
And Life, and Love, and gladness that Love brings
Laughed in the music, like a child that sings.

Master of each, Arch-Master! We that still
Wait in the verge and outskirt of the Hill,
Look upward lonely-lonely to the height
Where thou hast climbed, for ever, out of sight!

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

EMIGRAVIT, OCTOBER VI., MDCCCXCII.

GRIEF there will be, and may,
When King Apollo's bay

Is cut midwise;

Grief that a song is stilled,
Grief for the unfulfilled
Singer that dies.

Not so we mourn thee now,
Not so we grieve that thou,
MASTER, art passed,

Since thou thy song didst raise,
Through the full round of days,
E'en to the last.

Grief there may be, and will,
When that the singer still
Sinks in the song;

When that the winged rhyme

Fails of the promised prime,
Ruined and wrong.