Time, with his constant touch, has half erased
The memory, but he cannot dim the fame
  Of one who best of all has paraphrased
The tale of waters with a tale of flame,
Yet left us but his accents and his name.

Upon that life, the sun of history
Shines not, but Legend, like a moon in mist,
  Sheds over it a weird uncertainty,
In which all figures wave and actions twist,
So that a man may read them as he list.

We know not if he trod some Theban street,
And sought compassion on his aged woe,
  We know not if on Chian sand his feet
Left footprints once; but only this we know,
How the high ways of fame those footprints show.

Along the border of the restless sea,
The lonely thinker must have loved to roam,
  We feel his soul wrapt in its majesty,
And he can speak in words that drip with foam,
As though himself a deep, and depths his home.

Hark! under all and through and over all,
Runs on the cadence of the changeful sea;
  Now pleasantly the graceful surges fall,
And now they mutter in an angry key
Ever, throughout their changes, grand and free.

How sternly sang he of Achilles’ might,
How sweetly of the sweet Andromache,
  How low his lyre when Ajax prays for light;
(Well might he bend that lyre in sympathy
For also great, and also blind was he.)

We almost see the nod of sternbrowed Jove,
And feel Olympus shake; we almost hear
  The melodies that Greek youths interwove
In paean to Apollo, and the clear,
Full voice of Nestor, sounding far and near.

A dignity of sadness filled his heart,
That sadness, born of immortality,
  Which they alone who live in art
Feel in its sweetness and its mystery,
Half-filled already with infinity.

Yea, Zeus was wise when he decreed him blind,
And wiser still when he decreed him poor;
  For insight grew as outer sight declined,
And want overrode the ills it could not cure,
Else rhapsody had lacked its lay most pure.

OUR UNDERLYING EXISTENCE.

O Fool, that wisdom dost despise,
  Thou knowest not, thou canst not guess
Another part of thee is wise
  And silent sees thy foolishness.

Yet, fool, how dare I pity thee
  Because my heart reveres the sages;
The fool lies also deep in me;
  We all are one beneath the ages.

To ______.

“Creation—­God’s kind giving—­
  Continues:  did not at one Adam end. 
New realms start open to each generation,
  Each man receives some gift, some revelation: 
I, in this late age living,
  The gift, the new-creation of a friend.

TO A DEBUTANTE.

Thou who smilest in thy freshness,
  Bright as bud in morning dew;
Keep this thought in thy heart’s bower
“Ever turn, like sunward flower,
  To the Good, the Fair, the True.”