Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

     Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath
     Into the lifeless creed,
They saw her plumed and mailed,
     With sweet, stern face unveiled,
And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

IV.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
     Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
     To make the next age better for the last?
Is earth too poor to give us
     Something to live for here that shall outlive us,—
Some more substantial boon
     Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?
The little that we see
     From doubt is never free;
The little that we do
     Is but half-nobly true;
With our laborious hiving
     What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,
     Only secure in every one's conniving,
A long account of nothings paid with loss,
     Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
After our little hour of strut and rave,
     With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
     Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.
But stay! No age was e'er degenerate
     Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our image still is shaped our fate
     Ah, there is something here
Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer,
     Something that gives our feeble light
A high immunity from Night,
     Something that leaps life's narrow bars
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;