Round about the board of banquet
Blazed the bright wits of the town:
“A royal toast,” and well they drank it—
“‘Tis for a king to wear the crown;
Thrones may totter in the tempest,
Empires, too, may rise and fall;
But a king, by grace of genius,
Sits secure above them all.”
Thus, a grave and graceful poet,
And his glowing glass uplifts
With a warm eye-flash of welcome
To the Man of Many Gifts;
Then a clamor and kindly clinking
Like sudden song breaks round the board,
And the soul of the wine they’re drinking
Seems into their own souls poured.
And, “Huzza for our guest, King Irving;”
From a hundred hearty throats,
And the lovingly lengthened greeting,
Like a chorused chime, up floats—
When more swift than an earthly echo
Bursts a sound over guest and hosts,
Strangely shrill, yet faint and far off,—
“Way there for the coming ghosts!”
Into statued silence stricken,
Stand and gaze the speechless throng,
While the walls slide wide from side to side
As if moved in grooves along,
And a shadowy stage, whose foot-lights
Loom white through a weirdly mist,
Is peopled with phantoms of players
Trooping in as if keeping a tryst.
Then with buskined steps and soundless,
Streaming forward as a tide,
Surge the serried shades of actors
Whose greatness time has testified;
And their brows are bound with bay-leaves,
And their garments’ phantomed fold
Shape out the bygone costumes
Of the parts they played of old.
All the fine and famous faces
In the records of the stage,
Canonized in highest places
On the drama’s brightest page!
Their “brief hour” made eternal,
Where the deathless laurel nods,
And where Shakespeare reigns superral
In the green-room of the gods!
There, each grandly visioned visage,
Looking through a mellow haze
On the spell-bound reverent watchers
With a long, fraternal gaze,
Whose mute and mighty meaning
Seem, like a benediction, cast
O’er the promise of the present,
By the high priests of the past!
Then, at an unseen, silent signal,
Given by some mystic chief,
Each of the ghosts of great ones
From his own wreath plucks a leaf,
And fleeter than arrowed lightning
Through space a chaplet’s sped!
And the brow of the actor living
Is laurelled by actors dead!
And a sigh sweeps over the silence,
And the walls are walls again,
While the lights flash up to brightness,
And sparkles the gold champagne;
And the joyous voice of the poet
Rings out the blended toasts,
“Huzza for our good guest, Irving!”
And “Huzza for our grand old ghosts!”