Garland: Chart me the difficult main

A relatively small group of 35 mourners gathered at Neshonoc Cemetery in West Salem, Wisconsin on March 14, 1940 to celebrate the life of Hamlin Garland, the writer and literary scholar who had died ten days earlier. In his 80 years, he had done what he could to promote the American Midwest (or, as he called it, the Middle Border). His writings, including many autobiographical ones, traced through Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, Illinois, and more. As one modern critic has noted, Garland "contrasted the beauty and power of nature with the labors of farmers too hard-pressed to appreciate it." Reverend John B. Fitz concluded the funeral services with a reading of Garland's poem "The Cry of the Age" (1899):

What shall I do to be just?
  What shall I do for the gain
Of the world—for its sadness?
Teach me, O Seers that I trust!
  Chart me the difficult main
Leading out of my sorrow and madness
  Preach me the purging of pain.

Shall I wrench from my finger the ring
  To cast to the tramp at my door?
Shall I tear off each luminous thing
  To drop in the palm of the poor?
What shall I do to be just?
  Teach me, O Ye in the light,
Whom the poor and the rich alike trust:
  My heart is aflame to be right.

*The image of Garland at his typewriter above dates to 1937. Courtesy of the Hamlin Garland Society. For some of the information in this post, I turned to Keith Newlin's Hamlin Garland: A Life (2008).

Dunbar: an immortality in this world

When Paul Laurence Dunbar died in Dayton, Ohio in 1906, several gathered for a memorial service. One who could not attend was a friend of Dunbar's who was also the mayor of Toledo, Brand Whitlock. His letter to the memorial chairperson is dated February 11, 1906 (the day before the service):

I wish I could be with you all to-morrow to pay my tribute to poor Paul. But I cannot, and feeling as I do his loss, I cannot now attempt any estimate of his wonderful personality that would be at all worthy. If friendship knew obligation, I would acknowledge my debt to you for the boon of knowing Paul Dunbar. It is one of the countless good deeds to your credit that you were among the first to recognize the poet in him and help him to a larger and freer life.
For Paul was a poet: and I find that when I have said that I have said the greatest and most splendid thing that can be said about a man.

Whitlock's letter was addressed to Dr. Henry Archibald Tobey, who had assisted Dunbar financially and help promote his writing. In fact, it was Tobey that help publish Dunbar's second book, Majors and Minors, in 1895. Tobey read Mayor Whitlock's letter at the memorial gathering. The letter included praise not only because of Dunbar's ability to impress his own people (i.e. African Americans) but all people, regardless of race. "The true poet is universal," Whitlock wrote, and Dunbar was a true poet whose best quality was universality.

Whitlock also noted that he knew what really killed Dunbar, not the disease of tuberculosis, but melancholy. In saying so, he alluded to the poet's drinking problem and his marital strife. Whitlock singled out some of his favorites not only to read, but to hear Dunbar present aloud, including "We Wear the Mask" and "Ships that Pass in the Night." Whitlock's letter concluded:

We shall hear that deep, melodious voice no more: his humor, his drollery, his exquisite mimicry—these are gone. And to-morrow you will lay his tired body away, fittingly enough, on [Abraham] Lincoln's birthday. But his songs will live and give his beautiful personality an immortality in this world.

Riley on McCulloch: heroically voicing

Oscar C. McCulloch moved to Indianapolis from Wisconsin at a terrible time in the state's history. Hurt by a bank panic, its citizens were poverty-stricken and despondent. Becoming the minister of the Plymouth Congregational Church in 1877, he wanted to do something. He soon became one of the strongest charity organizers the state had ever seen.

McCulloch emphasized the need to focus on individual suffering, and to find the causes of poverty and other obstacles in life in order to address them. One of those causes, he initially believed, was genetic (early on, he was an advocate of eugenics) before realizing that anyone can fall on hard times, regardless of background. Seeking inspiration from his religion, he often called upon Biblical stories and parables of Jesus. "We can do nothing, unless we see, as he saw, the divine humanity in each one,— broken, disfigured, deformed, all but obliterated," McCulloch once wrote. "This, and this only, gives the impulse to personal charity... As each blade of grass differs from each other, so each nature is different from each other." He further saw inspiration in literature and his speeches are full of references to Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and even Bret Harte.

When McCulloch died in 1891, Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley honored him with a poem for his funeral; it was printed in the Indianapolis Journal on December 12, 1891 (two days after McCulloch's death). Titled simply as "Oscar C. McCulloch," the poem asks its readers to avoid "sighs and tears" and, instead, honor him by continuing his work:

What would best please our friend, in token of
    The sense of our great loss?—Our sighs and tears?
Nay, these he fought against through all his years,
    Heroically voicing, high above
Grief's ceaseless minor, moaning like a dove,
    The paean triumphant that the soldier hears,
Scaling the walls of death, midst shouts and cheers,
    The old Flag laughing in his eyes' last love.

Nay, then, to pleasure him were it not meet
    To yield him bravely, as his fate arrives?—
Drape him in radiant roses, head and feet,
    And be partakers, while his work survives,
Of his fair fame,—paying the tribute sweet
    To all humanity—our nobler lives.

Lucy Stone: one of the anointed few

Lucy Stone was a well-known and respected abolitionist and suffragist. She became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree and kept her maiden name after she her marriage. As a public speaker and organizer, she was a constant advocate for civil rights throughout her life. She died in 1893 at the age of 75.

Stone's funeral was held on October 21, 1893. She had asked that her funeral be "simple and cheerful" but her wishes were undermined by the throng of admirers that came to pay their respects. Among her dozen pallbearers (six men and six women) was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her husband and supporter Henry Browne Blackwell had written to another champion of civil rights (especially for women), Julia Ward Howe: "what shall I do without her?" Howe memorialized Stone in a poem, "Lucy Stone":

Full of honors and of years,
   Lies our friend at rest,
Passing from earth's hopes and fears
   To the ever Blest.

One of the anointed few
   Touched with special grace
For a life whose service true
   Should redeem the race.

Where is that persuasive tone
   Welcome in our ears?
Still I hear it, sounding on,
   Through the golden spheres.

When we raise our battle cry
   For the holy Right,
We shall feel her drawing nigh
   With a spirit's might.

As the veil of flesh doth part,
   We behold her rise,
Crowned with majesty of heart:
   There true queendom lies.

O'Reilly and Riley: Beyond wonderment

After the death of Irish-born poet John Boyle O'Reilly (pictured), the "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley was moved to write a memorial poem. The poem was dated three days after O'Reilly's death, August 13, 1890 (the day of his funeral, which Riley may have attended):

DEAD? this peerless man of men—
Patriot, Poet, Citizen!—
   Dead? and ye weep where he lies
      Mute, with folded eyes!

Courage! All his tears are done;
Mark him, dauntless, face the sun!
   He hath led you.—Still, as true,
      He is leading you.

Folded eyes and folded hands
Typify divine commands
   He is hearkening to, intent
      Beyond wonderment.

'Tis promotion that has come
Thus upon him. Stricken dumb
   Be your moanings dolorous!
      God knows what He does.

Rather, as your chief, aspire!—
Rise and seize his toppling lyre,
   And sing Freedom, Home and Love,
      And the rights thereof!

Ere in selfish grief ye sink,
Come! catch rapturous breath and think—
   Think what sweep of wing hath he,
      Loosed in endless liberty.

Years earlier, O'Reilly, who was editor of the Boston Pilot, had helped Riley break into the the literary scene of that city. At a time when he most needed it, O'Reilly offered high praise: "He has a rare quality as a writer," he wrote, and predicted his reputation would soon burst outside of his native Indiana. "Hoozierdom cannot hold his reputation locally. He will grow to be an American poet, or we know nothing of the signs of genius."

Such heart-breaking loveliness

After the famous actor Edwin Booth's death, he was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the rest of his family, including his infamous brother, were buried in Baltimore). Poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich served as a pallbearer for the funeral, and wrote of the experience to fellow writer William Winter on June 12, 1893.

Just as Edwin was laid in the grave, among the fragrant pine-boughs which lined it, and softened its cruelty, the sun went down. I never saw anything of such heart-breaking loveliness as this scene. There in the tender afterglow two or three hundred men and women stood silent with bowed heads. A single bird, in a nest hidden somewhere near by twittered from time to time. The soft June air, blowing across the upland, brought with it the scent of syringa blossoms from the slope below. Overhead and among the trees the twilight was gathering. "Good night, sweet Prince!" I said, under my breath.

Aldrich admitted in his account of the experience that he would have fell to the grass-covered ground and cried — "if there had not been a crowd of people."

Two years earlier, a new portrait of Booth was put on display. Aldrich was moved enough by the image to write a poem about it:

That face which no man ever saw
And from his memory banished quite,
With eyes in which are Hamlet's awe
And Cardinal Richelieu's subtle light
Looks from this frame. A master's hand
Has set the master-player here,
In the fair temple that he planned
Not for himself. To us most dear
This image of him!" It was thus
He looked; such pallor touched his cheek;
With that same grace he greeted us —
Nay, 't is the man, could it but speak!"
Sad words that shall be said some day —
Far fall the day! O cruel Time,
Whose breath sweeps mortal things away,
Spare long this image of his prime,
That others standing in the place
Where, save as ghosts, we come no more,
May know what sweet majestic face
The gentle Prince of Players wore!

Dunbar: I love the dear old ballads best

Late in 1905, a close friend of Paul Laurence Dunbar died suddenly. The Ohio-born poet felt that his own days were numbered and, though his mother warned him not to, he attended the funeral. It was a harsh, cold winter, and Dunbar stood bareheaded as he watched his friend's coffin lowered into the grave.

"Like the fields, I am lying fallow," he wrote that Christmas, "and it will take a long time to make anything worth coming out in blossom." Separated from his wife Alice Ruth Moore and suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar was depressed and tired. His mother turned her living room into a bedroom for him and let him sleep close to the fireplace. It was in that room and in his mother's arms that Dunbar died in 1906.

His funeral was held February 12, 1906 at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dayton — the same church he attended as a boy. He was buried at Woodland Cemetery. A friend, Brand Whitlock (then mayor of Toledo, Ohio), wrote to Dunbar's mother: "You have lost a son, I have lost a friend, but America has lost more than all else and that is a poet."

His poem "Songs":

I love the dear old ballads best,
          That tell of love and death,
Whose every line sings love's unrest
          Or mourns the parting breath.
I love those songs the heart can feel,
          That make our pulses throb;
When lovers plead or contrites kneel
          With choking sigh and sob.

God sings through songs that touch the heart,
          And none are prized save these.
Though men may ply their gilded art
          For fortune, fame, or fees,
The muse that sets the songster's soul
          Ablaze with lyric fire,
Holds nature up, an open scroll,
          And build's art's funeral pyre.

Halleck: most beloved and most wide-famed

The poet Fitz-Greene Halleck died at the age of 77 of a "bronchial disease." Though virtually forgotten today, Halleck was a major celebrity in the world of American literature in his day. His funeral, held on November 22, 1867, was a major event.

After a formal service in Christ Church in his native Guilford, Connecticut, Halleck's casket was opened so that, as his first biographer wrote, "kinsmen, friends, and neighbors were gratified with a last view of the poet's fine features, to which death had added a more than earthly beauty." Then, a procession walked about a mile to Alderbrook Cemetery for the poet's burial. Months later, friends and admirers raised money for a massive granite monument to mark the grave. On it was inscribed: "One of the few, the immortal names that were not born to die." They also planted ivy which had been picked from Sunnyside, the famous home of Washington Irving.

Within a few days of his death, notices were published as far away as Greece (a newspaper in that country referred to him as "the most beloved and most wide-famed of all the poets of the New World"). The New York Historical Society held a major dinner event in honor of Halleck, led by fellow poet William Cullen Bryant (who also memorialized Irving for the same organization). When Richard Henry Dana, Sr. heard of all the excitement in honor of Halleck, he noted, "Had he lived, how his genial nature would have enjoyed it!"

From Halleck's poem, "The Love of Notoriety ":

There are laurels our temples throb warmly to claim,
Unwet by the blood-dripping fingers of War,
And as dear to the heart are the whispers of fame,
As the blasts of her bugle rang fiercely and far;
The death-dirge is sung o'er the warrior's tomb,
Ere the world to his valor its homage will give,
But the feathers that form Notoriety's plume,
Are plucked in the sunshine, and live while we live.

There's a wonderful charm in that sort of renown
Which consists in becoming "the talk of the town;"
'Tis a pleasure which none but your "truly great" feels,
To be followed about by a mob at one's heels;
And to hear from the grazing and mouth-open throng,
The dear words "That's he," as one trudges along;
While Beauty, all anxious, stands up on tip-toes,
Leans on her beau's shoulder, and lisps "There he goes."

Child: We are not dead; we are the living

After an accomplished career as a writer and a proponent of reform movements (including abolitionism), Lydia Maria Child died at the age of 78. Two days later, on October 23, 1880, her funeral was held before her burial at North Cemetery in Wayland, Massachusetts. There were very few in attendance — friends, neighbors, nieces, the few remaining fellow abolitionists, and "poor people who had been recipients of her charity."

Child's majors works included a domestic manual for those with only a modest income and her Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). The book, printed still early in the active anti-slavery movement, was controversial; the Boston Athenaeum even revoked Child's free library privileges. It argued that slavery was destructive to everyone, including slave owners, and urged northerners to take action. It was read by people like William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Wendell Phillips. Phillips in particular credited Child's book as a main source of inspiration for his own anti-slavery efforts.

In fact, it was Phillips that presented the eulogy at Child's funeral in 1880. "Mrs. Child's character was one of rare elements," he said, "and their combination in one person rarer still." Phillips said that she always followed one divine rule: "Bear ye one another's burdens." He also noted that she never slowed down, even inher old age. She had "still the freshness of girlhood... [with] ready wit, quick retort, mirthful just." He also claimed that, in their last meeting, Child thought "spirit hands" had given her the words which should inscribe her epitaph: "You think us dead. We are not dead; we are the living." Those words were, in fact, inscribed on her gravestone.

Child's good friend John Greenleaf Whittier was particularly saddened by her death. To her, he dedicated his poem "Within the Gate." The poem concludes:

And so, since thou hast passed within the gate
      Whereby awhile I wait,
I give blind grief and blinder sense the lie:
      Thou hast not lived to die!

To holier tasks that God has willed

The activist William Lloyd Garrison died after a sudden illness. A funeral was held on May 28, 1879 that drew an impressive crowd of admirers, including several fellow abolitionists (Wendell Philips and Lucy Stone, for example).

The poet-abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was represented too. An original poem was written specifically for the occasion and read by one of the ministers. Whittier had earned his earliest support from Garrison, who published his first poem, helped him get formal schooling, and got him a job with an abolitionist newspaper. In the 1830s, Whittier said he loved Garrison like a brother, making Whittier's poem, titled "Garrison," quite appropriate for the occasion:

The storm and peril overpast,
     The hounding hatred shamed and still,
Go, soul of freedom! take at last
    The place which thou alone canst fill.

Confirm the lesson taught of old —
    Life saved for self is lost, while they
Who lose it in His service hold
    The lease of God's eternal day.

Not for thyself, but for the slave
    Thy words of thunder shook the world;
No selfish griefs or hatred gave
    The strength wherewith thy bolts were hurled.

From lips that Sinai's trumpet blew
    We heard a tenderer undersong;
Thy very wrath from pity grew,
    From love of man thy hate of wrong.

Now past and present are as one;
    The life below is life above;
Thy mortal years have but begun
    The immortality of love.

With somewhat of thy lofty faith
    We lay thy outworn garment by,
Give death but what belongs to death,
    And life the life that cannot die!

Not for a soul like thine the calm
    Of selfish ease and joys of sense;
But duty, more than crown or palm,
    Its own exceeding recompense.

Go up and on! thy day well done,
    Its morning promise well fulfilled,
Arise to triumphs yet unwon,
    To holier tasks that God has willed.

Go, leave behind thee all that mars
    The work below of man for man;
With the white legions of the stars
    Do service such as angels can.

Wherever wrong shall right deny,
    Or suffering spirits urge their plea,
Be thine a voice to smite the lie,
    A hand to set the captive free!

At sunset, Garrison was laid to rest at Forest Hills Cemetery in Massachusetts.

*The bust above was sculpted by Anne Whitney, who also created a statue of fellow abolitionist Charles Sumner, now located in Harvard Square. This image of Garrison was used as the frontispiece for the published version of Garrison's services.

Death of Emily Dickinson

The end of Emily Dickinson's life was full of grief. In April 1882, a minister she befriended named Charles Wadsworth died and, six months later, her mother died. A little over a year later, her favorite nephew died too. In March 1884, her friend Otis Phillips Lord (a judge, whom some speculate may have been a romantic interest) died. Dickinson wrote, "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come."

On May 15, 1886, Dickinson herself died of a form of kidney disease called Bright's disease. She was 55 years old. She requested that all her letters be burned; she left no specific instructions about her manuscript poems, which were found later. Few had ever been published.

Her funeral was held in the library at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her white coffin was decorated with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid, and blue field violets. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor from whom she sought advice on her writing, read the poem "No Coward Soul Is Mine" by Emily Brontë. He had previously met her only twice but would become her greatest booster posthumously. She was buried in the family plot at West Cemetery in Amherst (pictured). The greater controversy over her poems was yet to come.

Her poems were heavily edited then re-edited posthumously, before later being restored. Her poems are usually without titles and today are often referred to by a numbering system. This one was numbered XXXI. in a 1924 edition:

Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
"Dissolve," says Death. The Spirit, "Sir,
I have another trust."

Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.

A dirge for Albert Pike

Albert Pike gave up on writing poetry long before his death and turned his attention particularly to his role with the Freemasons; he earned the title Sovereign Grand Commander. At 81 years old, he wrote his will, leaving specific instructions for the care of his body and his funeral. However, when he died on April 2, 1891, his instructions were not followed.

He asked that his body be "cremated without any ceremony other than the word 'Good-bye!'" His ashes, he asked, be placed between two acacia trees. He specifically requested no "procession, parade or music," only the Kadosh ceremony of the Freemasons. Instead, his Masonic brothers had his body lay in state for two days, where it was visited by thousands. In addition to the Kadosh the next day, they held services at an episcopal church the day after that.

Rather than no ceremony at all, it was somewhat extravagant. One attendee noted that the walls of the church were covered in black draperies and his coffin was surrounded by candles in tall, silver candlesticks. At his head was a huge iron cross. The body was draped in laurel, vines, berries, and violets. He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C. Other Masons commissioned a white marble gravestone which was placed in 1917. As he requested, the stone listed only his name, birth and death dates, and the words: Laborum Ejus Superstites Sunt Fructus Vixit. Apparently, his body was later moved to the House of the Temple, the Masonic headquarters in Washington.

Shortly after his death, efforts were made to honor Albert Pike with public art in Washington, D.C. A statue was finally unveiled in 1901. It depicts Pike with a book in one hand seated on a slab of granite, with a secondary statue of Minerva at his feet. A witness to its unveiling called it "one of the most important Masonic events that ever took place." Masons from around the country were present. Pike remains the only former Confederate officer honored with a statue in Washington.

 From his poem, "A Dirge":

     Vainly, ah! vainly we deplore
     Thy death, departed friend! No more
  Shalt thou be seen by us beneath the skies.
     The barbed arrow has gone through
     Thy heart, and all the blue
  Hath faded from thy clay-cold veins, and thou,
  With stern and pain-contracted brow,
Like one that wrestled mightily with death,
     Art lying here now.

Whitman's funeral and burial

After the death of Walt Whitman, his friend Thomas Eakins and an assistant created his death mask as well as a plaster cast of the poet's hand. An autopsy was performed, despite objections from brother George Whitman, but following the request of the poet himself. The funeral for Walt Whitman was held March 30, 1892.

Whitman's polished-oak casket was displayed in the parlor of his Mickle Street home in Camden, NJ. The public viewing was from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. and drew at least a thousand visitors, including neighborhood friends and curious laborers on their lunch break. A police officer was stationed at the door to direct traffic.

A carriage then took Whitman's body to his final resting-place at Harleigh Cemetery. Thousands upon thousands lined the streets to watch the procession. A ceremony featured speakers from Whitman's cadre of disciples (none particularly famous by today's standards). Readings came from Confucious, Buddha, Plato, the Koran, and the Bible. The only blood relative in attendance was George, whose injury during the Civil War inspired the poet's writing and his life. George did not speak and was likely confused by the ceremony and the extravagant praise bestowed on his dead brother. George, when he received his copy of Leaves of Grass, "didn't think it worth reading."

Whitman's $4,000 tomb was built to his specifications on a 20' x 30' plot of land gifted by the Harleigh Cemetery Association. Whitman ordered the construction of the "plain massive stone temple" with an iron gate and large bronze lock, inspired by an etching called "Death's Door" by William Blake. The roof was a foot and a half thick and some of the blocks weighed 8 to 10 tons. Whitman watched its construction, sent photos to friends, and proudly reported it as a celebration of his personality. Friends thought it a bit outrageous and accused the contractors, Reinhalter and Company of Philadelphia, of swindling the elder poet. Whitman himself only paid $1,500 of the cost; a friend settled the rest of the bill. The result was, he wrote, "the rudest most undress'd structure... since Egypt, perhaps the cave dwellers." Later, Whitman's parents and other relatives were moved there as well. Even so, the only name on the tomb's exterior remains "Walt Whitman."

*Photo of the death mask is courtesy of Princeton Libraries.

Funeral of N. P. Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis outlived his own soaring reputation. His funeral (and, perhaps, that of his literary reputation) was held on January 24, 1867.

Willis had died on his 61st birthday four days earlier. Less than 20 years before his death, he was making $10,000 a year (equal to over $300,000 today) while living a life of semi-retirement, writing at ease while fighting illness at his home, Idlewild, in the town of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, within earshot of the artillery drills at West Point Military Academy. In fact, Willis was living the life of a convalescent, perpetually weak and ill for much of his later years. One friend later wrote, "there has hardly been a man of letters doomed to such protracted torments from bodily disease." Willis's final work was, appropriately, The Convalescent (1859), a series of chit-chatty epistolary sketches, including one about visiting his neighbor Washington Irving at Sunnyside.

The reality seems to be that Willis was already forgotten by the time The Convalescent was released (its last sketch was titled "Funeral Procession"). No less a figure than the future President of the United States, James A. Garfield, wrote in his diary: "Willis is said to be a licentious man, although an unrivaled poet. How strange that such men should go to ruin, when they might soar perpetually in the heaven of heavens." Some of his obituaries noted it was assumed Willis was already dead.

Nevertheless, Willis's funeral on January 24 was a major event. Local book stores were closed as a sign of respect. The service was held at St. Paul's Church before his burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His pallbearers included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Richard Henry Dana, James Russell Lowell, Edwin Percy Whipple, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (all but Dana were later buried in Mount Auburn too).

Clearly, Willis was a powerhouse for a time. But, even his first major biographer, Henry Beers in 1885, mused that Willis was from a forgotten era and that he may not survive in American collective memory in the future. That prediction seems true, but I would love to see a Willis revival. Consider my favorite poem by him, "April." A bit old-fashioned and sentimental, but beautiful nonetheless:

I have found violets. April hath come on,
And the cool winds feel softer, and the rain
Falls in the beaded drops of summer-time.
You may hear birds at morning, and at eve
The tame dove lingers till the twilight falls,
Cooling upon the eaves, and drawing in
His beautiful, bright neck; and, from the hills,
A murmur like the hoarseness of the sea,
Tells the release of waters, and the earth
Sends up a pleasant smell, and the dry leaves
Are lifted by the grass; and so I know
That Nature, with her delicate ear, hath heard
The dropping of the velvet foot of Spring.
Take of my violets! I found them where
The liquid south stole o'er them, on a bank
That lean'd to running water. There's to me
A daintiness about these early flowers,
That touches me like poetry. They blow
With such a simple loveliness among
The common herbs of pasture, and breathe out
Their lives so unobtrusively, like hearts
Whose beatings are too gentle for the world.
I love to go in the capricious days
Of April and hunt violets, when the rain
Is in the blue cups trembling, and they nod
So gracefully to the kisses of the wind.
It may be deem'd too idle, but the young
Read nature like the manuscript of Heaven,
And call the flowers its poetry. Go out!
Ye spirits of habitual unrest,
And read it, when the "fever of the world"
Hath made your hearts impatient, and, if life
Hath yet one spring unpoison'd, it will be
Like a beguiling music to its flow,
And you will no more wonder that I love
To hunt for violets in the April-time.

*Pictured is Willis's simple headstone at Mount Auburn. If visiting (which you should), look for the Charles T. Torrey memorial on the map; he is across from it, behind the bushes. A larger obelisk marks the family plot.