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10 THE ATHENAEUM ELEGY Well do ye hide your face, ye reigning sun, Beneath a dimming mist; for is cast o’er A wounded race a day of endless gloom, A day of lesser merriment—a day More poignant than that whose fatal Records show complete efface of Alexandrian Lore. Yea, well might you stand still as on the day When Hezekiah call’d thee not in vain. Where is the soul that shed a gleam of light Eternal upon the clouded paths of truant men? Thee, immortal spirit, I beseech, If through ambition, courage, and toil, what Is good, and what is perfect does not come, Pray tell me of some saner course, That I and others looking upwards might Endure. O gifted son, thy epitaph Is written on the hearts of living men By whom the matchless worth and ceaseless praise Shall e’er be sung. We, stagg’ring ’neath the load That fate hast brought us stare upon the main All solitary. Failing in what thou Hast taught us, cursed be our souls always. Ye living men, your rarest gems search’d out From virgin veins, your sweetest flow’rs vas’d in, Cannot with him compare—and lo, he’s gone! Life’s minor strain, ye death, in all your schemes, Nor did you hurl more posion’d dart; nor did More fatal quiven shoot than that—the shaft Which tore the heart of our belov’d— Fallen,—and Oh, so soon! Ye beacon light Of fifteen million men, whose eyes with tears O’er flow’d, are groping in the dark; whose hearts Heavy with grief, are wailing—but in vain. A sweeter bliss than earth affords, be thine. To lose were not a task could we recall, The high command to weep at infant’s birth; For he who sways the earth, the sparrow’s fall Doth note, again can swell our hearts with jocund mirth. —A. P. Turner, ’24.