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great doom's image!
"Our royal master's murdered!
"Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
- * *
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further."
Macbeth.
Not as when some great Captain falls
In battle, where his Country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs
To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or, in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who _must_ be victors then!
Nor as when sink the civic Great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords--
With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our Dead
Do we to-day deplore
The Man that is no more!
Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,--
A Wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits--what is to come!
Not more astounded had we been
If Madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!
We woke to find a mourning Earth--
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,--
The roof-tree fallen,--all
That could affright, appall!
Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cesar's brow!
No Cesar he, whom we lament,
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would see, to do
His work--and perish too!
Not by the weary cares of State,
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:
Not in the dar