Spake full well in language quaint and olden,
One who dwelt beside the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden.
Stars that in earth’s firmament do shine.
Come to me, O ye children!
And whisper in my ear
What the birds and the winds are singing
In your sunny atmosphere.
Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems.
And all the rest are dead.
When e’er a noble deed is wrought.
When e’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts in glad surprise
To higher levels rise.
There is no Death! What seems so is transition.
This life of mortal breath
Is but the suburb of the life elysian
Whose portal we call Death.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
God sent his singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth.
That they might touch the hearts of men.
And bring them back to heaven again.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng.
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
We shall be sifted till the strength
Of self-conceit be changed at length
To meekness.
Storms do not rend the sail that is furled;
Nor, like a dead leaf, tossed and whirled
In an eddy of wind, is the anchored soul.
All common things, each day’s events
That with the hour begin and end.
Our pleasures and our discontents.
Are rounds by which we may ascend.
The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept.
Were toiling upward in the night.
