The alabaster bed,

Where in the plume of seraph sunk thy head,
To the full-sounding organ of the sphere,
So amorously played

By the smooth, hyaline finger of thy peer!

Be those blue eyes

Thy only atmosphere !

For in them lies

What is than earth, than heaven more dear."

III.

ODE OF 1882. F. B. SANBORN.

I.

ACROSS these meadows, o'er the hills,

Beside our sleeping waters, hurrying rills,

Through many a woodland dark and many a bright

arcade,

Where out and in the shifting sunbeams braid

An Indian mat of checkered light and shade,-
The sister seasons in their maze,

Since last we wakened here

From hot siesta the still drowsy year,

Have led the fourfold dance along our ways;-
Autumn apparelled sadly gay,

Winter's white furs and shortened day,

Spring's loitering footstep, quickened at the last,
And half the affluent Summer went and came,
As for uncounted years the same,

Ah me another unreturning spring hath passed.

II.

"When the young die," the Grecian mourner said,
"The spring-time from the year hath vanished,"
The gray-haired poet, in unfading youth,
Sits by the shrine of Truth,
Her oracles to spell,

And their deep meaning tell;

Or else he chants a bird-like note

From that thick-bearded throat

Which warbled forth the songs of smooth-cheeked May

Beside Youth's sunny fountain all the day;

Sweetly the echoes ring

As in the flush of spring;

At last the poet dies,

The sunny fountain dries,

The oracles are dumb, no more the wood-birds sing.

III.

Homer forsakes the billowy round.

Of sailors circling o'er the island-sea;

Pindar, from Theban fountains and the mound
Builded in love and woe by doomed Antigone,
Must pass beneath the ground;

Stout Eschylus that slew the deep-haired Mede
At Marathon, at Salamis, and freed

Athens from Persian thrall,

Then sung the battle-call,

Must yield to that one foe he could not quell;
In Gela's flowery plain he slumbers well.

Sicilian roses bloom

Above his nameless tomb,

And there the nightingale doth mourn in vain
For Bion, too, who sang the Dorian strain :
By Arethusa's tide

His brother swains might flute in Dorian mood,
The bird of love in thickets of the wood

Sing for a thousand years his grave beside,-
Yet Bion still was mute, — the Dorian lay had died.

IV.

The Attic poet at approach of age

Laid by his garland, took the staff and scrip,

For singing-robes the mantle of the sage,

And taught gray wisdom with the same grave lip

That once had carolled gay,

Where silver flutes breathed soft, and festal harps

did play;

Young Plato sang of love and beauty's charm,
While he that from Stagira came to hear,

In lyric measures bade his princely pupil arm
And strike the Persian tyrant mute with fear.
High thought doth well accord with melody,
Brave deed with Poesy,

And song is prelude fair to sweet Philosophy.
But wiser still was Shakspeare's noble choice,
Poet and sage at once, whose varied voice

Taught beyond Plato's ken while charming every

ear,

A kindred choice was his, our poet, sage, and seer!

V.

Now Avon glides through Severn to the sea,

And murmurs that her Shakspeare sings no more;
Thames bears the freight of many a tribute shore,
But on those banks her poet bold and free,
That stooped in blindness at his lowly door,
Yet never bowed to priest or prince the knee,
Wanders no more by those sad sisters led;
Herbert and Spenser dead

Have left their names alone to him whose scheme

Stiffly endeavors to supplant the dream

Of seer and poet, with mechanic rule

Learned from the chemist's closet, from the surgeon's

tool.

With us Philosophy still spreads her wing,

And soars to seek Heaven's King,

Nor creeps through charnels, prying with the glass That makes the little big, - while gods unseen may

pass.

VI.

Along the marge of these slow-gliding streams,
Our winding Concord and the wider flow
Of Charles by Cambridge, walks and dreams
A throng of poets, tearfully they go,

For each bright river misses from its band

The keenest eye, the truest heart, the surest minstrel

hand,

They sleep each on his wooded hill above the sorrow

ing land.

Sadly their mound with garlands we adorn

Of violet, lily, laurel, and the flowering thorn, -
Sadly above them wave

The wailing pine-trees of their native strand;
Sadly the distant billows smite the shore,
Plash in the sunlight, or at midnight roar :
All sounds of melody, all things sweet and fair,
On earth, in sea or air,

Droop and grow silent by the poet's grave.

VII.

Yet wherefore weep? Old age is but a tomb,
A living hearse, slow creeping to the gloom
And utter silence. He from age is freed
Who meets the stroke of death, and rises thence
Victor o'er every woe; his sure defence

Is swift defeat, by that he doth succeed:
Death is the poet's friend,

I speak it sooth;

Death shall restore him to his golden youth,
Unlock for him the portal of renown,
And on Fame's tablet write his verses down
For every age in endless time to read.

With us Death's quarrel is; he takes away

Joy from our eyes, from this dark world the day, When other skies he opens to the poet's ray.

VIII.

Lonely these meadows green,

Silent these warbling woodlands must appear
To us, by whom our Poet-sage was seen

Wandering among their beauties, year by year,—