For all his life was poor without, O Nature, make the last amends Train all thy flowers his grave about, And make thy singing-birds his friends! Revive again, thou summer rain, The broken turf upon his bed Breathe, summer wind, thy tenderest strain Of low, sweet music overhead! With calm and beauty symbolize The peace which follows long annoy, And lend our earth-bent, mourning eyes, Some hint of his diviner joy. For safe with right and truth he is, As God lives he must live alway; There is no end for souls like his, No night for children of the day! Nor cant nor poor solicitudes Made weak his life's great argument; Small leisure his for frames and moods Who followed Duty where she went. The broad, fair fields of God he saw Beyond the bigot's narrow bound; The truths he moulded into law In Christ's beatitudes he found. His state-craft was the Golden Rule, His right of vote a sacred trust; Clear, over threat and ridicule, All heard his challenge: "Is it just?" And when the hour supreme had come, Not for himself a thought he gave; In that last pang of martyrdom, His care was for the half-freed slave. Not vainly dusky hands upbore, In prayer, the passing soul to heaven Whose mercy to His suffering poor Was service to the Master given. Long shall the good State's annals tell, Her children's children long be taught, How, praised or blamed, he guarded well The trust he neither shunned nor sought. If for one moment turned thy face, O Mother, from thy son, not long He waited calmly in his place The sure remorse which follows wrong. Forgiven be the State he loved The one brief lapse, the single blot; Forgotten be the stain removed, Her righted record shows it not! The lifted sword above her shield With jealous care shall guard his fame; The pine-tree on her ancient field To all the winds shall speak his name. The marble image of her son Her loving hands shall yearly crown, And from her pictured Pantheon His grand, majestic face look down. O State so passing rich before, Who now shall doubt thy highest claim? The world that counts thy jewels o'er Shall longest pause at Sumner's name! 1874. THEIRS I. Fate summoned, in gray-bearded age, to act A history stranger than his written fact, Him who portrayed the splendor and the gloom Of that great hour when throne and altar fell With long death-groan which still is audible. He, when around the walls of Paris rung The Prussian bugle like the blast of doom, And every ill which follows unblest war Maddened all France from Finistere to Var, The weight of fourscore from his shoulders flung, And guided Freedom in the path he saw Lead out of chaos into light and law, Peace, not imperial, but republican, And order pledged to all the Rights of Man.