It may be that his manly chant, beside
  More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened since he died
  Upon the century’s noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
  The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
  Where he with joy believed;—­

Enough that there is none since risen who sings
  A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
  Which is our source and goal;
And though at touch of later hands there float
  More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass ere trills another note
  So sweet, so great, so true.

WORDSWORTH’S GRAVE

I

The old rude church, with bare, bald tower, is here;
  Beneath its shadow high-born Rotha flows;
Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near,
  And with cool murmur lulling his repose

Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near. 
  His hills, his lakes, his streams are with him yet. 
Surely the heart that read her own heart clear
  Nature forgets not soon:  ’tis we forget.

We that with vagrant soul his fixity
  Have slighted; faithless, done his deep faith wrong;
Left him for poorer loves, and bowed the knee
  To misbegotten strange new gods of song.

Yet, led by hollow ghost or beckoning elf
  Far from her homestead to the desert bourn,
The vagrant soul returning to herself
  Wearily wise, must needs to him return.

To him and to the powers that with him dwell:—­
  Inflowings that divulged not whence they came;
And that secluded spirit unknowable,
  The mystery we make darker with a name;

The Somewhat which we name but cannot know,
  Ev’n as we name a star and only see
His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
  And ever hide him, and which are not he.

II

Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave! 
  When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then? 
To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave,
  The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men?

Not Milton’s keen, translunar music thine;
  Not Shakespeare’s cloudless, boundless human view;
Not Shelley’s flush of rose on peaks divine;
  Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

What hadst thou that could make so large amends
  For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed,
Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends?—­
  Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest.

From Shelley’s dazzling glow or thunderous haze,
  From Byron’s tempest-anger, tempest-mirth,
Men turned to thee and found—­not blast and blaze,
  Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth,