How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,

Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

They knew that outward grace is dust;

They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,

Ere any names of Serf and Peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface

And thwart her genial will;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. 25

I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be
In him who condescends to victory
Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,
Safe in himself as in a fate.

30

5

So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,

But at last silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 10 Our children shall behold his fame,

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

15

VIRGINIA

From Under the Old Elm

Virginia gave us this imperial man

Cast in the massive mould

Of those high-statured ages old

Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;
20 She gave us this unblemished gentleman:
What shall we give her back but love and praise
As in the dear old unestrangèd days
Before the inevitable wrong began?

Mother of States and undiminished men,

25 Thou gavest us a country, giving him,

And we owe always what we owed thee then:

The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us again Shines as before with no abatement dim.

A great man's memory is the only thing
With influence to outlast the present whim

And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.

All of him that was subject to the hours

Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours:

Across more recent graves,

Where unresentful Nature waves

5

Her pennons o'er the shot-plowed sod,

Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,

We from this consecrated plain stretch out

10

Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt
As here the united North

Poured her embrownèd manhood forth

In welcome of our savior and thy son.

Through battle we have better learned thy worth,
The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,
Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,
Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.
Both thine and ours the victory hardly won;
If ever with distempered voice or pen

We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back,
And for the dead of both don common black.
Be to us evermore as thou wast then,

As we forget thou hast not always been,
Mother of States and unpolluted men,

Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!