To Alexander Galt, The Sculptor.

Alas! he's cold!     Cold as the marble which his fingers wrought -     Cold, but not dead; for each embodied thought     Of his, which he from the Ideal brought         To live in stone,     Assures him immortality of fame.         Galt is not dead!         Only too soon         We saw him climb     Up to his pedestal, where equal Time     And coming generations, in the noon     Of his full reputation, yet shall stand     To pay just homage to his noble name.     Our Poet of the Quarries only sleeps,     He cleft his pathway up the future's steeps,     And now rests from his labors.         Hence 'tis I say;     For him there is no death,     Only the stopping of the pulse and breath -     But simple breath is not the all in all;     Man hath it but in common with the brutes -     Life is in action and in brave pursuits!     By what we dream, and having dreamt, dare do,     We hold our places in the world's large view,     And still have part in the affairs of men             When the long sleep is on us.     He dreamt and made his dreams perpetual things     Fit for the rugged cell of penitential saints,             Or sumptuous halls of Kings,             And showed himself a Poet in the Art:     He chiselled Lyrics with a touch so fine,     With such a tender beauty of their own,     That rarest songs broke out from every line     And verse was audible in voiceless stone!     His Psyche, soft in beauty and in grace,     Waits for her lover in the Western breeze,     And a swift smile irradiates her face,     As though she heard him whisper in the trees.     His passion-stricken Sappho seems alive -     Before her none can ever feel alone,     For on her face emotions so do strive     That we forget she is but pallid stone;     And all her tragedy of love and woe     Is told us in the chilly marble's snow.     Bacchante, with her vine-crowned hair,     Leaps to the cymbal-measured dance     With such a passion in her air -     Upon her brow - upon her lips -     As thrills you to the finger-tips,     And fascinates your glance.     These are, as 'twere, three of his Songs in stone -     The first full of the tenderness of love,     Speaking of moon-rise, and the low wind's call:     The second of love's tragedy and fall;     The third of shrill, mad laughter, and the tone     Of festal music, on whose rise and fall     Swift-footed dancers follow.     Nobler than these sweet lyric dreams,     Dreamt out beside Italia's streams,     He'd worked some Epic studies out, in part -     To leave them incomplete his chiefest pain     When the low pulses of his failing heart             Admonished him of death.     Ay! he had soared upon a lofty wing,     Wet with the purple and encrimsoned rain     Of dreams, whose clouds had floated o'er his brain             Until it ached with glories.     If you would see his Epic studies, go -     Go with the student from his dim arcade -     Halt where the Statesman standeth in the hall,     And mark how careless voices hush and fall,     And all light talk to sudden pause is brought     In presence of the noble type of thought -     Embodied Independence which he wrought             From stone of far Carrara.     View his Columbus: Hero grand and meek,     Scarred 'mid the battle's long-protracted brunt -     Palos and Salvador stamped on his front,     With not a line about it, poor or weak -     A second Atlas, bearing on his brow     A New World, just discovered.     Go see Virginia's wise, majestic face     With some faint shadow of her coming woe     Writ on the broad, expansive, virgin snow     Of her imperial forehead, just as though     Some disembodied Prophet-hand of eld     The Sculptor's chisel in its touch had held,     Foreshadowing her coming crown of thorns -     Her crown and her great glory!     These of the many; but they are enough -     Enough to show that I have rightly said     The marble's snow bids back from him decay,     He sleepeth long; but sleeps not with the dead     Who die, and are forgotten ere the clay     Heaped over them hath hardened in the sun.     This much of Galt, the Artist:         Of the man     Fain would I speak, but in sad sooth I can     Ne'er find the words wherein to tell     How he was loved, or yet how well         He did deserve it.     All things of beauty were to him delight -     The sunset's clouds - the turret rent apart -     The stars which glitter in the noon of night -     Spoke in one voice unto his mind and heart,     His love of Nature made his love of Art,             And had his span             Of life been longer     He had surely done     Such noble things that he     Like to a soaring eagle would have been     At last - lost in the sun!