HENRY FAWCETT BORN 1833, DIED NOV. 6, 1884
Reading edition
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.’
328Held 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.
Punch.
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