The black earth yawns: the mortal
disappears;

1

*,

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
He is gone who seem'd so great.—
Gone; but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own
Being here, and we believe him
Something far advanced in State,
And that he wears a truer crown
Than any wreath that man can weave him.
Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,

And in the vast cathedral leave him.' God accept him, Christ receive him. 1852.

270

280

Lord Tennyson.

TO THE PAST 1

WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls,
O kingdom of the past!

There lie the bygone ages in their palls,
Guarded by the shadows vast;

There all is hushed and breathless,
Save when some image of old error falls
Earth worshipped once as deathless.

7

There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast,

The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands

That once lit all the East;

A dotard bleared and hoary,

There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Of Asia's long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried 'neath the sea
Thy courts and temples stand;
Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry
Of saints and heroes grand,

Thy phantasms grope and shiver,

Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently
Into Time's gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,
Of their old godhead lorn,

Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
Which they misdeem for morn;
And yet the eternal sorrow

In their unmonarched eyes says day is done
Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse,
The shapes that haunt thy gloom

Make signs to us and move their withered lips
Across the gulf of doom;

Yet all their sound and motion

Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of

ships

On the mirage's ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth
From out thy desolate halls,

If some grim shadow of thy living death
Across our sunshine falls

35

14

21

28

And scares the world to error,

The eternal life sends forth melodious breath

To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds

Are silent now in dust,

Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds
Beneath some sudden gust;

Thy forms and creeds have vanished,
Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds

From the world's garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee
Leaps in our age's veins;

Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,
And shake thine idle chains ;-

To thee thy dross is clinging,

For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see,

Thy poets still are singing.

42

49

56

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care,
Float the green Fortunate Isles

Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share
Our martyrdoms and toils;

The present moves attended

With all of brave and excellent and fair
That made the old time splendid.

1845

James Russell Lowell.

63

TO THE FUTURE

O LAND of Promise! from what Pisgah's height
Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers,
Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight.
Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers?
Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold,
Its crags of opal and of chrysolite,
Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold
Still brightening abysses,

And blazing precipices,

Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, Sometimes a glimpse is given

Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted

blisses..

O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf

Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps; Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps, As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart,

The hurrying feet, the curses without
number,

And, circled with the glow Elysian,
Of thine exulting vision,

Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace

12

and slumber.

22

To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered hands
And cries for vengeance; with a pitying

smile

Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands, And her old woe-worn face a little while Grows young and noble; unto thee the Oppressor Looks, and is dumb with awe;

The eternal law,

Which makes the crime its own blindfold

redresser,

Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,

And he can see the grim-eyed Doom
From out the trembling gloom

Its silent-footed steeds towards his palace

goading.

What promises hast thou for Poet's eyes,
Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong!
To all their hopes what overjoyed replies!
What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song!
Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling
clangor

Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the

poor;

The humble glares not on the high with anger; Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for

more;

34

In vain strives Self the godlike sense to smother; From the soul's deeps

It throbs and leaps;

The noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost

brother.

46