“Boss” Shepherd, you are dead.  Your hand no more
  Throws largess to the mobs that ramp and roar
  For blood of benefactors who disdain
  Their purity of purpose to explain,
  Their righteous motive and their scorn of gain. 
  Your period of dream—­’twas but a breath—­
  Is closed in the indifference of death. 
  Sealed in your silences, to you alike
  If hands are lifted to applaud or strike. 
  No more to your dull, inattentive ear
  Praise of to-day than curse of yesteryear. 
  From the same lips the honied phrases fall
  That still are bitter from cascades of gall. 
  We note the shame; you in your depth of dark
  The red-writ testimony cannot mark
  On every honest cheek; your senses all
  Locked, incommunicado, in your pall,
  Know not who sit and blush, who stand and bawl.

  “Seven Grecian cities claim great Homer dead,
  Through which the living Homer begged his
    bread.” 
  So sang, as if the thought had been his own,
  An unknown bard, improving on a known. 
  “Neglected genius!”—­that is sad indeed,
  But malice better would ignore than heed,
  And Shepherd’s soul, we rightly may suspect,
  Prayed often for the mercy of neglect
  When hardly did he dare to leave his door
  Without a guard behind him and before
  To save him from the gentlemen that now
  In cheap and easy reparation bow
  Their corrigible heads above his corse
  To counterfeit a grief that’s half remorse.

  The pageant passes and the exile sleeps,
  And well his tongue the solemn secret keeps
  Of the great peace he found afar, until,
  Death’s writ of extradition to fulfill,
  They brought him, helpless, from that friendly zone
  To be a show and pastime in his own—­
  A final opportunity to those
  Who fling with equal aim the stone and rose;
  That at the living till his soul is freed,
  This at the body to conceal the deed!

  Lone on his hill he’s lying to await
  What added honors may befit his state—­
  The monument, the statue, or the arch
  (Where knaves may come to weep and dupes to march)
  Builded by clowns to brutalize the scenes
  His genius beautified.  To get the means,
  His newly good traducers all are dunned
  For contributions to the conscience fund. 
  If each subscribe (and pay) one cent ’twill rear
  A structure taller than their tallest ear.

  Washington, May 4, 1903.

TO MAUDE.

  Not as two errant spheres together grind
    With monstrous ruin in the vast of space,
    Destruction born of that malign embrace,
  Their hapless peoples all to death consigned—­
  Not so when our intangible worlds of mind,
    Even mine and yours, each with its spirit race
    Of beings shadowy in form and face,
  Shall drift together on some blessed wind.