XXVIII.
But now, like doves “with healing on their wings,”
Blossom and fruit with gladdening kindness come,
Charming to sleep my murmuring song, that sings
Unworthy dirges over Mather’s tomb:
Welcome the olive-branch their message brings!
It bids me wish him not the mouldering doom
Of nameless scribes of “mémoires pour servir,”
Dishonest “chroniclers of time’s small-beer.”
XXIX.
No: a born Poet, at his cradle-fire
The muses nursed him as their bud unblown,
And gave him as his mind grew high and higher,
Their ducal strawberry-leafs enwreathed renown.
Alas! that mightiest masters of the lyre,
Whose pens above an eagle’s heart have grown,
In all the proud nobility of wing,
Should stoop to dip their points in passion’s poison-spring!
XXX.
Yet Milton, weary of his youth’s young wife,
To her, to king, to church, to law untrue,
Warred for divorce and discord to the knife,
And proudest wore his plume of darkest hue:
And Dante, when his Florence, in her strife,
Robbed him of office and his temper, threw
