The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead’s high-piled heap, A cairn which every science helped to build, Unvalued will its golden secrets keep: He knows at last if Life or Death be best: Wherever he be flown, whatever vest The being hath put on which lately here So many-friended was, so full of cheer To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest, We have not lost him all; he is not gone To the dumb herd of them that wholly die; The beauty of his better self lives on In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye He trained to Truth’s exact severity; He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him Whose living word still stimulates the air? In endless file shall loving scholars come The glow of his transmitted touch to share, And trace his features with an eye less dim Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb. FLORENCE, ITALY, _February, 1874_. TO HOLMES ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY. Dear Wendell, why need count the years Since first your genius made me thrill, If what moved then to smiles or tears, Or both contending, move me still? What has the Calendar to do With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth With gay immortals such as you Whose years but emphasize your youth? One air gave both their lease of breath; The same paths lured our boyish feet; One earth will hold us safe in death, With dust of saints and scholars sweet. Our legends from one source were drawn, I scarce distinguish yours from mine, And _don’t_ we make the Gentiles yawn With “You remembers?” o’er our wine! If I, with too senescent air, Invade your elder memory’s pale, You snub me with a pitying “Where Were you in the September Gale?” Both stared entranced at Lafayette, Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet As scarcely worth one’s while to see. Ten years my senior, when my name In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ, Her halls still echoed with the fame Of you, her poet and her wit. ’Tis fifty years from then to now: But your Last Leaf renews its green, Though, for the laurels on your brow (So thick they crowd), ’tis hardly seen. The oriole’s fledglings fifty times Have flown from our familiar elms; As many poets with their rhymes Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms. The birds are hushed, the poets gone Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach, And still your wingëd brood sing on To all who love our English speech. Nay, let the foolish records be That make believe you’re seventy-five: You’re the old Wendell still to me,-- And that’s the youngest man alive. The gray-blue eyes, I see them still, The gallant front with brown o’erhung, The shape alert, the wit at will, The phrase that stuck, but never stung. You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs, Whose gaunt line my horizon hems, Though twilight all the lowland blurs, Hold sunset in their ruddy stems.