Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/234

206 II

But not for ourselves alone are we spent in grieving,

For the stricken Land we mourn whose light is darkened,

Whose soul in sorrow went forth in the night-time with thine.

Lover and laureate thou of the wide New World,

Whose pines, and prairies, and people, and teeming soil,

Where was shaken of old the seed of the freedom of men,

Thou didst love as a strong man loveth the maiden he woos,—

Not the woman he toys with, and sings to, and, passing, forgets,—

Whom he woos, whom he wins, whom he weds; his passion, his pride;

Who no shadow of wrong shall suffer, who shall stand in his sight

Pure as the sky of the evil her foeman may threat,

Save by word or by thought of her own in her whiteness untouched

And wounded alone of the lightning her spirit engenders.

III

Take of thy grief new strength, new life, O Land!

Weep no more he is lost, but rejoice and be glad forever

That thy lover who died was born, for thy pleasure, thy glory—

While his love and his fame light ever thy climbing path.

August 14, 1891.

THE SILENCE OF TENNYSON

that great shade into the silence vast

Through thinking silence past;

When he, our century's soul and voice, was husht,