Both eloquent and learn'd and brave, Born to command and skill'd to rule, One made the citizen a slave, The other makes him more--a fool. The Cæsar an imperial crown, His slaves' mad gift, refused to wear, The R*k*r put his fool's cap on, And found it fitted to a hair; The Cæsar, though by birth and breeding, Travel, the ladies, and light reading, A gentleman in mien and mind, And fond of Romans and their mothers, Was heartless as the Arab's wind, And slew some millions of mankind, Including enemies and others. The R*k*r, like Bob Acres, stood Edgeways upon a field of blood, The where and wherefore Swartwout knows, Pull'd trigger, as a brave man should, And shot, God bless them--his own toes. The Cæsar pass'd the Rubicon With helm, and shield, and breastplate on, Dashing his war-horse through the waters; The R*k*r would have built a barge Or steamboat at the city's charge, And pass'd it with his wife and daughters. But let that pass. As I have said, There's naught, save laurels, on your head, And time has changed my clustering hair, And shower'd the snow-flakes thickly there; And though our lives have ever been, As different as their different scene; Mine more renown'd for rhymes than riches Yours less for scholarship than speeches; Mine pass'd in low-roof'd leafy bower, Yours in high halls of pomp and power, Yet are we, be the moral told, Alike in one thing--growing old, Ripen'd like summer's cradled sheaf, Faded like autumn's falling leaf-- And nearing, sail and signal spread, The quiet anchorage of the dead. For such is human life, wherever The voyage of its bark may be, On home's green-bank'd and gentle river Or the world's shoreless, sleepless sea.