Edwin Booth

Now is the night, foreshadowed of our fears;
The curtain falls, the lights fade, one by one.
Darkness and silence from the widowed stage
Proclaim the great and final act is done.
Vain are the thundered plaudits of the house,
The laurel wreath, the players' loud acclaim;
Thou art grown dumb to clamoring for response,
Deaf to the ringing of thy jewelled name.
Thy crystal soul hath traversed back the pathway whence it came.

They who the virtues of the mighty dead
Enwrap in majesty of broidered verse,
Call upon Nature, in her solitude,
His beauties and her sorrow to rehearse.
The forest and the field, the fitful wind
They challenge, and the ever-sounding wave,
To seek his spirit in the vast afar,
And drop their dews on his enriched grave,
Crowning the poet's lyric woe with some forlorner stave.

Greater than all the universe of space
The mimic world thou didst thyself create:
The subtile sphere, compact of passion's breath,
Where Nature bade thee hold imperial state.
There shall the mourning garments be outworn;
There shall the desolate their dirges sing;
No princeling may ascend the vacant throne,
Laying new triumph's gall to sorrow's sting.
"The King is dead!" we cry, but nevermore, "Long live the King!"

Of all the stops of mortal harmony
Master thou art forever, though in death.
The melancholy of the Dane is thine,
The poisonous blighting of Iago's breath.
Thou didst take on foul Richard's humpbacked soul,
And clasp it close, yet do thine own no wrong:
As 't were the mantle of Sir Caradoc,
Unerring witness sung in ancient song,
Destined to prove the pure of heart more pure, the strong more strong.

Slave of self-conjured evil, Cawdor's thane!
The jester, bitter-hearted, striking home!
The fox-robed cardinal, creating France,
And launching forth the curse of sovereign Rome!
Gallant Don Cesar, lord of ragged lace!
These wert thou in their turn, and sorrow-blind,
Alas! thou wert the doited father, too,
Pelted by heaven, and stabbed by human kind:
Heartbreakingly confest, "I am not in my perfect mind!"

Such was thy Protean form, but what wert thou?
A changing cloud, content to borrow hue
From lordly sun-rays that o'errule it quite,
And thus with color and with form endue?
Nay, rather let the time's remembrancing,
When it doth con anew thy mortal span,
Ignore thine art, if such despite may be,
But bow in awe before thy nature's plan,
Crying with trumpet tone, to alien ears, "This was a man!"

Thine was the guilt of filching heavenly fire;
Wherefore Jove's eagle fed upon thy heart.
Yet never word nor strangled cry betrayed
Responsive agony beneath the smart.
A thousand hovering spectres menaced thee
Bound, by eternal fiat, on the rock
Of mortal languishment: yet unappalled
As gallant bird beneath the tempest shock;
For still thy soul soared free, thy silence met each hideous mock.

And can such glory pass? Nay, thus thou art,
Where'er in world diviner thou dost walk,
Mated with love celestial, that doth spring,
Fragrant and fair, from life's divided stalk.
But we who knew thee may not cease to mourn
The moment's grief, the time's perpetual loss.
Not ours to pluck from thine engraved name
Oblivion's cold and memory-choking moss:
Blest are we for so noble sake to bear affliction's cross.

Henceforward nevermore may Denmark's Prince
Pace through his tragic hour in sabled pride
But thou, the sceptre's rightful heir, wilt walk,
Eclipsing all his grandeur, by his side.
And dally as we may with pageantry
Wherein some newer actor plays a part,
The scene will fade, while thine enshadowed form
Doth from the slumbrous aisles of memory start, —
Again the lost but ever-reigning monarch of the heart.

Farewell! farewell indeed! But take with thee
Our true allegiance to that orient land, —
The laurels and the rosemary of life
Lying unnoted in thy nerveless hand.
Take with thee, too, our bond of gratitude,
That in a cynic and a tattling age
Thou didst consent to write, in missal script,
Thy name on the poor players' slandered page,
And teach the lords of empty birth a king may walk the stage.