Page:Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration.djvu/1

 THIRD SERIES.

Weak-winged is song,

Nor aims at that clear-ethered height

Whither the brave deed climbs for light:

We seem to do them wrong,

Bringing our robin's-leaf to deck their hearse

Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse,

Our trivial song to honor those who come

With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum,

And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire,

Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire:

Yet sometimes feathered words are strong,

A gracious memory to buoy up and save

From Lethe's dreamless ooze, the common grave

Of the unadventurous throng.

To-day our Reverent Mother welcomes back

Her wisest Scholars, those who understood

The deeper teaching of her mystic tome,

And offered their fresh lives to make it good:

No lore of Greece or Rome,

No science peddling with the names of things,