The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes Part 32

And lo! the starry folds reveal The blazoned truth we hold so dear To guard is better than to heal,-- The s.h.i.+eld is n.o.bler than the spear!

FOR THE BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

JANUARY 25, 1859

His birthday.--Nay, we need not speak The name each heart is beating,-- Each glistening eye and flus.h.i.+ng cheek In light and flame repeating!

We come in one tumultuous tide,-- One surge of wild emotion,-- As crowding through the Frith of Clyde Rolls in the Western Ocean;

As when yon cloudless, quartered moon Hangs o'er each storied river, The swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Ayr and Doon With sea green wavelets quiver.

The century shrivels like a scroll,-- The past becomes the present,-- And face to face, and soul to soul, We greet the monarch-peasant.

While Shenstone strained in feeble flights With Corydon and Phillis,-- While Wolfe was climbing Abraham's heights To s.n.a.t.c.h the Bourbon lilies,--

Who heard the wailing infant's cry, The babe beneath the sheeliug, Whose song to-night in every sky Will shake earth's starry ceiling,--

Whose pa.s.sion-breathing voice ascends And floats like incense o'er us, Whose ringing lay of friends.h.i.+p blends With labor's anvil chorus?

We love him, not for sweetest song, Though never tone so tender; We love him, even in his wrong,-- His wasteful self-surrender.

We praise him, not for gifts divine,-- His Muse was born of woman,-- His manhood breathes in every line,-- Was ever heart more human?

We love him, praise him, just for this In every form and feature, Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss, He saw his fellow-creature!

No soul could sink beneath his love,-- Not even angel blasted; No mortal power could soar above The pride that all outlasted!

Ay! Heaven had set one living man Beyond the pedant's tether,-- His virtues, frailties, HE may scan, Who weighs them all together!

I fling my pebble on the cairn Of him, though dead, undying; Sweet Nature's nursling, bonniest bairn Beneath her daisies lying.

The waning suns, the wasting globe, Shall spare the minstrel's story,-- The centuries weave his purple robe, The mountain-mist of glory!

AT A MEETING OF FRIENDS

AUGUST 29, 1859

I REMEMBER--why, yes! G.o.d bless me! and was it so long ago?

I fear I'm growing forgetful, as old folks do, you know; It must have been in 'forty--I would say 'thirty-nine-- We talked this matter over, I and a friend of mine.

He said, "Well now, old fellow, I'm thinking that you and I, If we act like other people, shall be older by and by; What though the bright blue ocean is smooth as a pond can be, There is always a line of breakers to fringe the broadest sea.

"We're taking it mighty easy, but that is nothing strange, For up to the age of thirty we spend our years like Change; But creeping up towards the forties, as fast as the old years fill, And Time steps in for payment, we seem to change a bill."

"I know it," I said, "old fellow; you speak the solemn truth; A man can't live to a hundred and likewise keep his youth; But what if the ten years coming shall silver-streak my hair, You know I shall then be forty; of course I shall not care.

"At forty a man grows heavy and tired of fun and noise; Leaves dress to the five-and-twenties and love to the silly boys; No foppish tricks at forty, no pinching of waists and toes, But high-low shoes and flannels and good thick worsted hose."

But one fine August morning I found myself awake My birthday:--By Jove, I'm forty! Yes, forty, and no mistake!

Why, this is the very milestone, I think I used to hold, That when a fellow had come to, a fellow would then be old!

But that is the young folks' nonsense; they're full of their foolish stuff; A man's in his prime at forty,--I see that plain enough; At fifty a man is wrinkled, and may be bald or gray; I call men old at fifty, in spite of all they say.

At last comes another August with mist and rain and s.h.i.+ne; Its mornings are slowly counted and creep to twenty-nine, And when on the western summits the fading light appears, It touches with rosy fingers the last of my fifty years.

There have been both men and women whose hearts were firm and bold, But there never was one of fifty that loved to say "I'm old"; So any elderly person that strives to s.h.i.+rk his years, Make him stand up at a table and try him by his peers.

Now here I stand at fifty, my jury gathered round; Sprinkled with dust of silver, but not yet silver-crowned, Ready to meet your verdict, waiting to hear it told; Guilty of fifty summers; speak! Is the verdict _old_.

No! say that his hearing fails him; say that his sight grows dim; Say that he's getting wrinkled and weak in back and limb, Losing his wits and temper, but pleading, to make amends, The youth of his fifty summers he finds in his twenty friends.

FOR THE FAIR IN AID OF THE FUND TO PROCURE BALL'S STATUE OF WAs.h.i.+NGTON

1630

ALL overgrown with bush and fern, And straggling clumps of tangled trees, With trunks that lean and boughs that turn, Bent eastward by the mastering breeze,-- With spongy bogs that drip and fill A yellow pond with muddy rain, Beneath the s.h.a.ggy southern hill Lies wet and low the Shawinut plain.

And hark! the trodden branches crack; A crow flaps off with startled scream; A straying woodchuck canters back; A bittern rises from the stream; Leaps from his lair a frightened deer; An otter plunges in the pool;-- Here comes old Shawmut's pioneer, The parson on his brindled bull!

1774

The streets are thronged with trampling feet, The northern hill is ridged with graves, But night and morn the drum is beat To frighten down the "rebel knaves."

The stones of King Street still are red, And yet the b.l.o.o.d.y red-coats come I hear their pacing sentry's tread, The click of steel, the tap of drum, And over all the open green, Where grazed of late the harmless kine, The cannon's deepening ruts are seen, The war-horse stamps, the bayonets s.h.i.+ne.

The clouds are dark with crimson rain Above the murderous hirelings' den, And soon their whistling showers shall stain The pipe-clayed belts of Gage's men.

186-

Around the green, in morning light, The spired and palaced summits blaze, And, sunlike, from her Beacon-height The dome-crowned city spreads her rays; They span the waves, they belt the plains, They skirt the roads with bands of white, Till with a flash of gilded panes Yon farthest hillside bounds the sight.

Peace, Freedom, Wealth! no fairer view, Though with the wild-bird's restless wings We sailed beneath the noontide's blue Or chased the moonlight's endless rings!

Here, fitly raised by grateful hands His holiest memory to recall, The Hero's, Patriot's image stands; He led our sires who won them all!

November 14, 1859.