To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom
  (Trophy that was to be of life long pain),
  The thread no other skill can ever knit again. 
    ’Twas so with him, for he was glad to live,
  ’Twas doubly so, for he left work begun;
  Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive
    Till all the allotted flax were spun? 
  It matters not; for, go at night or noon,
  A friend, whene’er he dies, has died too soon, 460
  And, once we hear the hopeless He is dead,
  So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

VI

1.

  I seem to see the black procession go: 
  That crawling prose of death too well I know,
  The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;
  I see it wind through that unsightly grove,
  Once beautiful, but long defaced
  With granite permanence of cockney taste
  And all those grim disfigurements we love: 
  There, then, we leave him:  Him? such costly waste 470
  Nature rebels at:  and it is not true
Of those most precious parts of him we knew: 
  Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,
  ’Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents
  Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;
  Nay, to be mingled with the elements,
  The fellow-servants of creative powers,
  Partaker in the solemn year’s events,
  To share the work of busy-fingered hours,
  To be night’s silent almoner of dew, 480
  To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,
  To stream as tides the ocean caverns through,
  Or with the rapture of great winds to blow
  About earth’s shaken coignes, were not a fate
    To leave us all-disconsolate;
Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod
    Of charitable earth
  That takes out all our mortal stains,
And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,
    Methinks were better worth
Than the poor fruit of most men’s wakeful pains, 491
    The heart’s insatiable ache: 
    But such was not his faith,
  Nor mine:  it may be he had trod
Outside the plain old path of God thus spake,
    But God to him was very God
    And not a visionary wraith
  Skulking in murky corners of the mind,
    And he was sure to be
Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, 500
Not with His essence mystically combined,
As some high spirits long, but whole and free,
  A perfected and conscious Agassiz. 
And such I figure him:  the wise of old
Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,
  Not truly with the guild enrolled
  Of him who seeking inward guessed
  Diviner riddles than the rest,
  And groping in the darks of thought
  Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; 510
  Rather he shares the daily light,
  From reason’s charier fountains won,
Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.