Bryant’s Seventieth Birthday
NOVEMBER 3, 1864
O EVEN-HANDED Nature! we confess
This life that men so honor, love, and bless
Has filled thine olden measure. Not the less.
We count the precious seasons that remain;
Strike not the level of the golden grain,
But heap it high with years, that earth may gain.
What heaven can lose,--for heaven is rich in song
Do not all poets, dying, still prolong
Their broken chants amid the seraph throng,
Where, blind no more, Ionia's bard is seen,
And England's heavenly minstrel sits between
The Mantuan and the wan-cheeked Florentine?
This was the first sweet singer in the cage
Of our close-woven life. A new-born age
Claims in his vesper song its heritage.
Spare us, oh spare us long our heart's desire!
Moloch, who calls our children through the fire,
Leaves us the gentle master of the lyre.
We count not on the dial of the sun
The hours, the minutes, that his sands have run;
Rather, as on those flowers that one by one.
From earliest dawn their ordered bloom display
Till evening's planet with her guiding ray
Leads in the blind old mother of the day,
We reckon by his songs, each song a flower,
The long, long daylight, numbering hour by hour,
Each breathing sweetness like a bridal bower.
His morning glory shall we e'er forget?
His noontide's full-blown lily coronet?
His evening primrose has not opened yet;
Nay, even if creeping Time should hide the skies
In midnight from his century-laden eyes,
Darkened like his who sang of Paradise,
Would not some hidden song-bud open bright
As the resplendent cactus of the night
That floods the gloom with fragrance and with
light?
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poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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