Before the hero's grave he stood,
--A simple stone of rest, and bare
To all the blessing of the air,--
And Peace came down in sunny flood
From the blue haunts of heaven, and smiled
Upon the household reconciled.
--A hundred years have hardly flown
Since in this hermitage of the West
'Mid happy toil and happy rest,
Loving and loved among his own,
His days fulfill'd their fruitful round,
Seeking no move than what they found.
Sweet byways of the life withdrawn!
Yet here his country's voice,--the cry
Of man for natural liberty,--
That great Republic in her dawn,
The immeasurable Future,--broke;
And to his fate the Leader woke.
Not eager, yet, the blade to bare
Before the Father-country's eyes,--
--E'en if a parent's rights, unwise,
With that bold Son he grudged to share,
In manhood strong beyond the sea,
And ripe to wed with Liberty!
--Yet O! when once the die was thrown,
With what unselfish patient skill,
Clear-piercing flame of changeless will,
The one high heart that moved alone
Sedate through the chaotic strife,--
He taught mankind the hero-life!
As when the God whom Pheidias moulds,
Clothed in marmoreal calm divine,
Veils all that strength 'neath beauty's line,
All energy in repose enfolds;--
So He, in self-effacement great,
Magnanimous to endure and wait.
O Fabius of a wider world!
Master of Fate through self-control
And utter stainlessness of soul!
And when war's weary sign was furl'd,
Prompt with both hands to welcome in
The white-wing'd Peace he warr'd to win!
Then, to that so long wish'd repose!
The liberal leisure of the farm,
The garden joy, the wild-wood charm;
Life ebbing to its perfect close
Like some white altar-lamp that pales
And self-consumed its light exhales.
No wrathful tempest smote its wing
Against life's tender flickering flame;
No tropic gloom in terror came;
Slow waning as a summer-spring
The soul breathed out herself, and slept,
And to the end her beauty kept.
Then, as a mother's love and fears
Throng round the child, unseen but felt,
So by his couch his nation knelt,
Loving and worshipping with her tears:--
Tears!--late amends for all that debt
Due to the Liberator yet!
For though the years their golden round
O'er all the lavish region roll,
And realm on realm, from pole to pole,
In one beneath thy stars be bound:
The far-off centuries as they flow,
No whiter name than this shall know!
--O larger England o'er the wave,
Larger, not greater, yet!--With joy
Of generous hearts ye hail'd the Boy
Who bow'd before the sacred grave,
With Love's fair freight across the sea
Sped from the Fatherland to thee!
And Freedom on that Empire-throne
Blest in his Mother's rule revered,
On popular love a kingdom rear'd,
And rooted in the years unknown,--
Land rich in old Experience' store
And holy legacies of yore,
And youth eternal, ever-new,--
From the high heaven look'd out:--and saw
This other later realm of Law,
Of that old household first-born true,
And lord of half a world!--and smiled
Upon the nations reconciled.
The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to
the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most
distinguished of his hosts said, 'an unwritten treaty of amity and
alliance.'
Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat
of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the
latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that
neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life:
and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he
retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the
strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil's type. And there
(Dec. 1799) was he buried.
_Not eager_; When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened
after 1765, Washington 'was less eager than some others in declaring or
declaiming against the mother country;' (Mahon: _Hist_. ch. lii).
_Ripe to wed with Liberty_; See _Appendix_ G.
_And to the end_; See Petrarch's beautiful lines: _Trionfo della Morte_,
cap. I.
_Due to the Liberator_; Compare the epitaph by Ennius on Scipio:
Hic est ille situs, cui nemo civi' neque hostis
Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.
History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more
unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George
Washington.
_The years unknown_; It is to Odin, whatever date be thereby signified,
that our royal genealogy runs back.