I

Long years and mellowing time had tinted o'er
The Picture raised by memory; the boy wore
The lineaments of ripened manhood, hued
And toned by sobered feeling, and subdued
By deepening shadows of the thoughtful mood,
On the calm brow by meditation lined,
As on its throne reposed the ascendant mind;
Each inward impress vibrating the tone
Of joy or grief, recalled like music flown;
With forms that lived and breathed, a shadowy throng,
Swept with the floods of time and life along.
Spring-growths had flowered and fled, that human tree
Had grown and blossomed to maturity;
All had been gathered from the roots of life
And knowledge to unfold its fullness, rife
With the vitalities of ages sped;
A portion of the strength whereon it fed.

II

In that grey Oratory where he sate
Books cast along the walls an air sedate:
Communion passionless of spirits fled,
The speaking records of the mighty dead;
Oracles false or true, upon their brows
The imperfection stamped that man avows
Too late, when vanity is graved with youth,
And the soul's vision opens on the truth,
Then when is owned the mortal life of fame,
And mutability our human name.
When time is felt a moment in the race
That tends toward a deathless dwelling-place;
Whose strifes, wave-like, advance on the recoil
Of baffled weakness sunken, a turmoil
Endless, to reach the same foot-printed shore
Bounded with wrecks of elder worlds strewed o'er;
A moment given to mark whereon he stood,
In a sand-trophy, buried and renewed.
Sages whose lives were one essay to find
Fresh tracks of thought, films ever intertwined
With tissue of grey dreamers gone before;
Who fretted in their web until it wore
Themselves away, in the vain hope to guide
Their race, a strife of vanity or pride,
The Gordian knot to loosen or divide.
Sophists who sought through tortuous creeds that rest
Whose cradle rocks but in the hopeful breast;
Faiths false or just, the Titans, striving still
To shape untrodden paths of good or ill;
To enlarge the ever-widening circle where
Thought weaves and leaves its tissue in despair;
Still echoing worn-out saws with mien profound,
In the large utterance of empty sound.

III

But he, that central picture, is it he
We saw erewhile, the ardent and the free?
Is this the growth of Nature's hand, the shoot
Branched vigorous forth from life's elastic root?
Pale was that brow, thought-ripening, where played
The unsettled purpose still by impulse swayed;
Depressed the lips, as one who early felt
The weight of life; despondent feeling dwelt
Unmasked and ruling there, the outward sign
Of a discouraged will, and the decline
Of faiths too ardent, blended with the pride
Of the self-love that would its weakness hide.

IV

Scrolls lay before him, rent and scattered leaves
As from wild Autumn's hair the whirlwind weaves;
Thereon as with a feverish hand were traced
Thoughts disunited, feelings with quick haste
Thrown into verse unfinished or defaced.
Didactic moral lifelessly rehearsed,
Dry, worn-out saws, by cold reflection nursed;
Fantastic images, grotesque and rude,
Sent forth unripened from that solitude;
Disjointed phantoms but in vision seen,
Tricked in device of language that had been;
Abortive geneses of things begun,
Forsook, ere shape or form distinct was won.
The Boy had grasped the mail he had not proved;
Embodied phantasies he had not loved;
Cold allegories decked, or quaintly dwelt
On fiery passion which he had not felt;
Gorgeous word-tissues, woven motley dress
Cast mantling over air-blown nothingness,
On a lay-figure heaped in idle strife,
To quicken the inanimate to life!

V

There sate the youthful sculptor, who too soon
From the rough block had feverishly hewn
The ideal beautiful he saw, the warm
Creation swelling to Promethean form.
Image of passion, visioned on the soul,
He strove to embody, felt beyond control
Of the wild grasp which vainly would retain
That panoplied Minerva of the brain,
The cloud too hastily embraced ere given
Power to enfold the majesty of heaven!
There sate the acolyte who had profaned
The spiritual shrine ere life ordained
The Priest for his great office: seen and known
The power that dwells in him, and still is shown;
When his high life the faith within him proves;
When he had probed the heart of man he loves,
Till truth gives utterance, and the inspiring thought
Proclaims the god is with his being wrought.

VI

Then sighed he, " Just the award, O life of mine!
Thou hast been phantasy, nor now repine
At truth, too rudely waking from the thrall
Of fancy's grasp enervating, that made
Of unused youth a vacant interval;
And the process of thought through wasted years delayed.
I, too, have walked Arcadia alone,
Yea, lived within an Eden of my own;
And there I plucked and ate but of the tree
Whose root and leaf is mutability.
But the life-fruit with hidden virtue crowned,
Implanted by the Maker, was unfound;
Its passionate utterance of joy or grief,
Or hope, or agony that asks relief
For its o'ergushing fullness was unheard;
Passed by, unculled its blossoming; and less
Gathered of truths we dare not to confess,
Of that mysterious world that in the breath
Of his great shadow lies, whose name is death.

VII

He felt our breathing being was to learn:
To radiate blossoms from thought's central flower;
And to the founts of life again return.
Man in enlarging childhood plays his hour
On Nature's breast, his failing will declined.
Ere bodied forth the purpose of the mind,
Ripened by formative time; the paths begun
Of his sire followed, and the same meed won;
Hope, and uncertainty, and eyes that yearn
For knowledge felt from far it vainly would discern.

VIII

" S PIRIT , that walkest in the garden still,
Wisdom, and light, and life ineffable!
Open the vision of the moth that plays
But round the edges of life's darkening blaze.
Give him thy breath to read thy oracles
In nature as himself; the thought that dwells
Wrapped in infinity's receptacles.
Let him his being's end fulfil, to be
A portion of the one humanity,
Bound to his brother man, yet linked with thee.
To feel in them and hear, until the tone
Of their endurance answers to his own;
To raise a song whose truth perchance may give
Life to itself, when he hath ceased to live
Who dared to hope from it; accorded vow
If, the high thought and purpose watching, Thou
Giv'st the great soul the power to fulfil;
Strengthening with hope and faith his steadfast will.