ng support. Some glide with slippered
lightness through the boudoirs of beauty; while others press the spurred
boot in furious battle. Some saunter along the flowery walks of rural
ease; while others climb, with iron-shod foot, the bold, bare, icy
precipice. Some tread, forever, the beaten paths of home; while others
print their feet upon the untrodden wilds of distant lands.

What a journey my old slippers have taken me; though they have never
been off their perch on the chair before me! Ah, Madam, let us hope,
that, when we have left them, with all our earthly garb, behind, and
they lie in corners, never to be worn by us again, we may soar above the
dark, devious ways of mortal life, may sweep on angel-wings through the
sun-lit ether, roam stainless and free through the eternal halls of
light, and tread with unclad feet the purple clouds of heaven!

ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION,

JULY 21, 1865.

I.

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 unventurous throng.

II.

To-day our Reverend 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,
Or reading stars to find inglorious fates,
Can lift our life with wings
Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits,
And lengthen out our dates
With that clear fame whose memory sings
In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates:
Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all!
Not such the trumpet-call
Of thy diviner mood,
That could thy sons entice
From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest
Of those half-virtues which the world calls best,