Minstrels! who your choicest notes
Keep for men who row in boats,
Mark with what exalted mien
Comes the Hero of the Scene!
He, amid the festal swarm,
Fashion’s glass and mould of form,
How in shape and how in features
Far surpassing other creatures,
How incomparable to
Common things like me and you!
He in whose transcendent state
All the ages culminate—
Could we ever keep him thus,
How delightful ’twere for us!
Could he, ’mid the admiring throng,
Ever beauteous, ever young,
Still abide for ever pent
In his true environment,
Wear that aureole still which now
Decks his high victorious brow!
Out, alas! that Fortune can’t
Ever give us what we want!
He must quit this vernal stage:
He must sink to middle age
(E’en the Poet’s soaring wit
Scarcely can envisage it):
Go with men of common clay
In to business every day:
Be perhaps a Brewer, or
Haply a Solicitor,—
None the fact to notice that
Haloes once adorned his hat:
Ay! the ways of Fate are odd:
Men are mortal . . . Ichabod . . .

* * * * *

Yet shall stay by stream and tree
Something still of what was He,—
Plainly put, his More or Less
Immaterial Consciousness,—
Very fine and very large,
Floating o’er his College barge:
Always while the world continues
Bards shall sing his thews and sinews,—
Here he rowed and here he ran,
Being rather more than man;—
Thus as ages onward go
Still he’ll great and greater grow,
Larger still in prose or rhyme
Looming down the aisles of time,
Till he sit, sublime and vast,
’Mid the Giants of the Past,
Men who lived in days of old
(Ch-tty, W- -dg-te, N-ck-lls, G-ld),
Lived and rowed in ages dark
Long ere Noah built the Ark,
Very, very famous oars,
Mighty men in Eights and Fours,
Towering o’er our Browns and Smiths
Huge and grey, like Monoliths.

Thus the Hero’s happy fate
Keeps in store a blissful state,
All adown the Future dim,
Nearly worthy e’en of Him!