His spirit still lingers with us, embodied in the songs which he sang, now out of a glad, now out of an aching heart. Well has it been said that a poet least of all needs a monumental pile. The Iliad towers high above the Pyramids, and will outlast them by ages. William Ward has left no Iliad; he sang not of the gods and demi-gods; he struck the lyre, and not the full-resounding harp. Intuition, early environment and scholastic training, as has been shown, combined to make of him a poet. Life's dull and dark experiences seemed to repress but could not suppress in him the "noble rage." Visions of beauty continually flitted in his imagination; music from choirs, visible and invisible, seemed ever to soothe and charm his troubled, lonely heart. Especially in the closing years of his life was poetry a joy and comfort to him. As the burdens of life were shifted to the shoulders of his children, he found more leisure, it appears, and indulged more frequently in poetic expression of the mood or thought that deeply stirred within. As might be supposed, his poems are of as diverse themes and varied measures as the moods and occasions which suggested them. In them may be best shown the poet and to some extent the man; hence, they deserve and, it is believed, will repay a full and close investigation. Hear him first, as in patriotic strain, he invites the world to his adopted land: COME TO THE SOUTH. Come to our hill-sides and come to our prairies, Broaden our fields with the spade and the plow; Bring us from Deutsche-land to gardens and dairies, To household and kitchen the fraulein and frau; Come from the birth-land of Goethe and Schiller, Scholar and poet and teacher and priest; Come where each acre of tilth needs a tiller, And people the South with the strength of the East; Bring you the songs and dance of Rhine-land The legends and sports of your home if you will; Give us the lays of your forest and vine-land, With the strong arm of labor the artisan's skill. Come from the cliffs where the sea-eagle fledges His brood o'er the wild ocean-storm of the North, Where the fisher-boats play round the moss-mantled ledges, Where the sea-kraken sports and the maelstrom has birth; Leave you the land where the treacherous glacier Mocks you, blinded and chilled with its pitiless glare, Where all save the mist-clouded rim of the geyser In the impotent sunlight lies frozen and bare; Where Hecla sits mailed like a desolate giant, With his flame-covered crest and his foot-stool of snow, O'er the storm-rended realm of the Viking defiant, And the sea rolling red in his terrible glow.