Virtus in arducis! Valour against odds

That must have daunted courage less complete.

A spectacle to gladden men, and meet

The calm approval of the gazing gods.

So some large singer of the heroic days

Might well have summed that life the fatal shears

Too soon have severed. Many fruitful years,

More conquests yet, still wider meed of praise,

All hoped of him who had goodwill of all,—

The brave, the justly balanced, calmly strong,

Friend of all truth, and foe of every wrong,

Who now, whilst lingering autumn’s last leaves fall,

Too soon! too soon! if the stern stroke of fate

Ever too early falls, or falls too late,

At least the passing of this stern, strong soul

In fullest strength and clearness wakes lament.

We could have better spared a hundred loud,

Incontinent, blaring flatterers of the crowd

Than him, whose self-respecting years were spent

In silent thought and sense-directed toil,

Ungagged by greed, unshackled and unswayed

By sordid impulse of the sophist’s trade,

By lies unsnared and unseduced by spoil.

No braver conquest o’er ill fortune’s flout

Our age has seen than his, who held straight on

Though the great God-gift from his days was gone,

‘And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.’

Held on with genial stoutness, seeing more

Than men with sight undarkened, but with mind

Through prejudice and party bias blind.

The ‘foolish fires’ of faction through the flare

Betraying beacons, in the battle’s van.

Vale! A valid and a valiant man!

Ampler horizons and serener air

Await the fighter of so good a fight

Than favour Party’s low, mist-haunted hollow.

Heart-deep regrets and honest plaudits follow

Him who has passed from darkness into light.