Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Personal Poems

In Remembrance of Joseph Sturge

IN the fair land o’erwatched by Ischia’s mountains,

Across the charmëd bay

Whose blue waves keep with Capri’s silver fountains

Perpetual holiday,

A king lies dead, his wafer duly eaten,

His gold-bought masses given;

And Rome’s great altar smokes with gums to sweeten

Her foulest gift to Heaven.

And while all Naples thrills with mute thanksgiving,

The court of England’s queen

For the dead monster so abhorred while living

In mourning garb is seen.

With a true sorrow God rebukes that feigning;

By lone Edgbaston’s side

Stands a great city in the sky’s sad raining,

Bareheaded and wet-eyed!

Silent for once the restless hive of labor,

Save the low funeral tread,

Or voice of craftsman whispering to his neighbor

The good deeds of the dead.

For him no minster’s chant of the immortals

Rose from the lips of sin;

No mitred priest swung back the heavenly portals

To let the white soul in.

But Age and Sickness framed their tearful faces

In the low hovel’s door,

And prayers went up from all the dark by-places

And Ghettos of the poor.

The pallid toiler and the negro chattel,

The vagrant of the street,

The human dice wherewith in games of battle

The lords of earth compete,

Touched with a grief that needs no outward draping,

All swelled the long lament,

Of grateful hearts, instead of marble, shaping

His viewless monument!

For never yet, with ritual pomp and splendor,

In the long heretofore,

A heart more loyal, warm, and true, and tender,

Has England’s turf closed o’er.

And if there fell from out her grand old steeples

No crash of brazen wail,

The murmurous woe of kindreds, tongues, and peoples

Swept in on every gale.

It came from Holstein’s birchen-belted meadows,

And from the tropic calms

Of Indian islands in the sun-smit shadows

Of Occidental palms;

From the locked roadsteads of the Bothnian peasants,

And harbors of the Finn,

Where war’s worn victims saw his gentle presence

Come sailing, Christ-like, in,

To seek the lost, to build the old waste places,

To link the hostile shores

Of severing seas, and sow with England’s daisies

The moss of Finland’s moors.

Thanks for the good man’s beautiful example,

Who in the vilest saw

Some sacred crypt or altar of a temple

Still vocal with God’s law;

And heard with tender ear the spirit sighing

As from its prison cell,

Praying for pity, like the mournful crying

Of Jonah out of hell.

Not his the golden pen’s or lip’s persuasion,

But a fine sense of right,

And Truth’s directness, meeting each occasion

Straight as a line of light.

His faith and works, like streams that intermingle,

In the same channel ran:

The crystal clearness of an eye kept single

Shamed all the frauds of man.

The very gentlest of all human natures

He joined to courage strong,

And love outreaching unto all God’s creatures

With sturdy hate of wrong.

Tender as woman, manliness and meekness

In him were so allied

That they who judged him by his strength or weakness

Saw but a single side.

Men failed, betrayed him, but his zeal seemed nourished

By failure and by fall;

Still a large faith in human-kind he cherished,

And in God’s love for all.

And now he rests: his greatness and his sweetness

No more shall seem at strife;

And death has moulded into calm completeness

The statue of his life.

Where the dews glisten and the songbirds warble,

His dust to dust is laid,

In Nature’s keeping, with no pomp of marble

To shame his modest shade.

The forges glow, the hammers all are ringing;

Beneath its smoky veil,

Hard by, the city of his love is swinging

Its clamorous iron flail.

But round his grave are quietude and beauty,

And the sweet heaven above,—

The fitting symbols of a life of duty

Transfigured into love!

1859.