35.

For of all souls for all time glorious none
  Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best,
Than he who wrote that scripture of the sun
  Writ as with fire and light on heaven’s own crest,
Of all words heard on earth the noblest one
  That ever spake for souls and left them blest: 
Gladly we should rest ever, had we Won
  freedom:  We have lost, and very gladly rest.
      O poet hero, lord
      And father, we record
  Deep in the burning tablets of the breast
      Thankfully those divine
      And living words of thine
  For faith and comfort in our hearts imprest
    With strokes engraven past hurt of years
And lines inured with fire of immemorial tears.

36.

But who being less than thou shall sing of thee
  Words worthy of more than pity or less than scorn? 
Who sing the golden garland woven of three,
  Thy daughters, Graces mightier than the morn,
More godlike than the graven gods men see
  Made all but all immortal, human born
And heavenly natured?  With the first came He,
  Led by the living hand, who left forlorn
      Life by his death, and time
      More by his life sublime
  Than by the lives of all whom all men mourn,
      And even for mourning praise
      Heaven, as for all those days
  These dead men’s lives clothed round with glories worn
    By memory till all time lie dead,
And higher than all behold the bay round Shakespeare’s head.

37.

Then, fairer than the fairest Grace of ours,
  Came girt with Grecian gold the second Grace,
And verier daughter of his most perfect hours
  Than any of latter time or alien place
Named, or with hair inwoven of English flowers
  Only, nor wearing on her statelier face
The lordlier light of Athens.  All the Powers
  That graced and guarded round that holiest race,
      That heavenliest and most high
      Time hath seen live and die,
  Poured all their power upon him to retrace
      The erased immortal roll
      Of Love’s most sovereign scroll
  And Wisdom’s warm from Freedom’s wide embrace,
    The scroll that on Aspasia’s knees
Laid once made manifest the Olympian Pericles.

38.

Clothed on with tenderest weft of Tuscan air,
  Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third,
With green Valdelsa’s hill-flowers in her hair
  Deep-drenched with May-dews, in her voice the bird
Whose voice hath night and morning in it; fair
  As the ambient gold of wall-flowers that engird
The walls engirdling with a circling stair
  My sweet San Gimignano:  nor a word
      Fell from her flowerlike mouth
      Not sweet with all the south;
  As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred