I in the world must live;—­but thou,
       Thou melancholy shade! 
     Wilt not, if thou can’st see me now,
       Condemn me, nor upbraid.

     For thou art gone away from earth,
       And place with those dost claim,
     The Children of the Second Birth,
       Whom the world could not tame.

* * * * *

     Farewell!—­Whether thou now liest near
       That much-loved inland sea,
     The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
       Vevey and Meillerie;

     And in that gracious region bland,
       Where with clear-rustling wave
     The scented pines of Switzerland
       Stand dark round thy green grave,

     Between the dusty vineyard-walls
       Issuing on that green place,
     The early peasant still recalls
       The pensive stranger’s face,

     And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date
       Ere he plods on again;—­
     Or whether, by maligner fate,
       Among the swarms of men,

     Where between granite terraces
       The blue Seine rolls her wave,
     The Capital of Pleasures sees
       Thy hardly-heard-of grave;—­

     Farewell!  Under the sky we part,
       In this stern Alpine dell. 
     O unstrung will!  O broken heart! 
       A last, a last farewell!

          MEMORIAL VERSES (1850)

     Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
     Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease,
     But one such death remained to come;
     The last poetic voice is dumb—­
     We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.

     When Byron’s eyes were shut in death,
     We bowed our head and held our breath. 
     He taught us little; but our soul
     Had felt him like the thunder’s roll. 
     With shivering heart the strife we saw
     Of passion with eternal law;
     And yet with reverential awe
     We watched the fount of fiery life
     Which served for that Titanic strife.

     When Goethe’s death was told, we said,—­
     Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head. 
     Physician of the iron age,
     Goethe has done his pilgrimage. 
     He took the suffering human race,
       He read each wound, each weakness clear;
     And struck his finger on the place,
       And said:  Thou ailest here, and here! 
     He looked on Europe’s dying hour
     Of fitful dream and feverish power;
     His eye plunged down the weltering strife,
     The turmoil of expiring life—­He
     said, The end is everywhere,
     Art still has truth, take refuge there! 
     And he was happy, if to know
     Causes of things, and far below
     His feet to see the lurid flow
     Of terror, and insane distress,
     And headlong fate, be happiness.