To Michelet on His "Priests, Women, and Families"

Michelet! Time urges me down life's descent,
Yet suffers me to breathe and look abroad
And view one object, grand and luminous,
In the clear south: 'tis thou; apart, alone,
Brave combatant, above all bravery
Of proudest battle-field! No eloquence
In thy own land, altho' that land pour'd forth
From Paschal and from Bossuet such as Rome
And Athens never heard, is warm as thine.
To raise the feeble, to abase the proud,
To strike the mask from frockt Hypocrisy,
Is worthy of thy genius. Deign to hear
One more applauder. If unfit to judge
How far above all others of our day
Thou standest, how much higher every hour
Will come to raise thee, deign to hear a voice
That falters with thy own, while that large heart
Swells o'er a mother's dust. Albeit too poor
Wert thou to bury her, the glorious son
Hath now erected over her a tomb
Such as, with all his wealth, no king to king,
No grateful nation to protector rais'd.