The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863. Various

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      As one, who under pay of priest or pope,

      Painteth an altar picture boldly bad,

      Yet winning worship from the common eye,

      Is less than one, who faltering day by day

      Before the untouched canvas, dreams, and feels

      An unaccomplished greatness: so is he

      Who scrapes the skies and cleaves the patient air

      For rhyming ecstasies to cheat the crowd,

      That sees not in the stiller worshipper

      The truer genius, who, in heights lone lost,

      Forgets to interpret to a lesser sense.

      O there do dwell among us minds divine,

      In which th' etherial is so subtly mixed,

      That only matter in its outward mien

      To the observer shows. Such ever live

      Unto themselves alone, in sweet still lives,

      And die by all men misinterpreted.

      Within a churchyard rise two honored urns

      O'er graves not far removed. The one records

      The 'genius of a Poet,' whose fitter fame

      Lies in the volumes which his facile pen

      Filled with the measure of redundant verse:

      Before this urn the oft frequented sod

      Is flattened with the tread of pensive feet.

      The other simply bears the name and age

      Of one who was 'a Merchant,' and bequeathed

      A fair estate with numerous charities:

      Before this urn the grass grows rank and green.

      I knew them both in life, and thus to me

      They measured in their lives their effigies:

      He who the pen did wield with facile power,

      Created what he wrote, and to the ear

      With tact, not inspiration, wrought the sounds

      To careful cadence; but the heart was cold

      As the chill marble where the sculptor traced

      Curious conceits of fancy. Let him pass,

      His name not undervalued, for his fame

      Shall in maturer ages lie as still

      As doth his neighbor's now.

      Turn we to him.

      He was a man to whom the general eye

      Bent with the confidence of daily trust

      In things of daily use: a man 'of means,

      —Sagacious, honest, plodding, punctual,—

      Revolving in the rank of those whose shields

      Bear bags of argent on a field of gold,

      His life, to most men, was what most men's are,—

      Unceasing calculation and keen thrift;

      Unvarying as the ever-plying loom,

      Which, moving in same limits day by day,

      Weaves mesh on mesh, in tireless gain of goods.

      But I, that knew him better than the herd,

      Yet saw him less, knew that in him which lives

      Still gracious and still plentiful to me

      Now he hath passed away from me and them.

      This man, whose talk on busy marts to men

      Teemed with the current coin of thrifty trade,

      —Exchanges, credits, money rates, and all,—

      Hath stood with me upon a silent hill,

      When the last flush of the dissolving day

      Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere

      Unconscious of my listening, uttered there

      The comprehensions of a soul true poised

      With elemental beauty, giving tongue

      Unto the dumbness of the blissful air.

      So have I seen him, too, within his home,

      When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze

      Seemed scanning issues from the money list;

      But comments came not, till my curious eye

      Led out his meditation into words,

      Thought-winding upward into sphery light,

      So utterly unearthly and sublime,

      That all the man of fact fled out of sense,

      And visual refinement filled the space.

      Oft hath he told me, nothing was so blind

      As the far-seeing wisdom of the world,

      And none within it knew him, save himself,

      And that so scantily, that but for faith

      In a redeeming knowledge yet to come,

      He would lie down and let his weakness die

      In self-reclaiming dust.

      After his death,

      I searched his papers, vainly, for a scrap

      Whereon some dropped memento might record

      His inner nature; but he nothing left—

      Nothing of that deep life whose wondrous light

      Guided him onward through the realms of sense,

      And in a world of practical self-need

      Sustained him with a glory unexpressed.

      And thus it is that round the Poet's urn,

      The sod is beaten down with pensive feet:

      And thus it is that where the Merchant lies,

      The grass, untrodden, groweth rank and green.