William Mercer Green Papers Box 1 Folder 2 Biographical Data Document 24

98 HISTORICAL MAGAZINE

Mr. Longfellow's kindly tact made him refrain from including the questionable comfort of the last two stanzas of the powem when writing to comfort Bishop Green. He could include the following stanzas in his published poem--his letter to the world--but not in his letter to the bereaved father:

He goes forth from the door, Who shall return no more. With him our joy deparats; The light goes out in our hearts; In the Chamber over the Gate We sit disconsolate. O Absalom, my soul

That 'tis a common grief Bringeth but slight relief; Ours is the bitterest loss, Ours is the heaviest cross; And forever the cry will be "Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!"8

Even on slight aquaintance the poet knew his correspondent better than to portray this saintly bishop as "disconsolate" or to make credible his saying, "Ours is the bitterest loss,/Ours is the heaviest cross;".

How wisely he forbore to add the final homily to a father who could appear before his Mississippi Church Council and speak these words:

I would fain spare your feelings as well as my own, by any attempted description of the ravages of that terrible disease. . . . It took from me a son who was the pride of my heart, and was rising rapidly to fill a larger place in the Church. Of his merits, whatever they may have been, I leave others to speak. To a father, it may be allowed to say, with thankfulness amid tears, that he lay not down on the dying bed until he had exhausted his strength in a day and night attendance on the dying and the dead, of all to whom he could render any service.9

The poet paralleled such courage and compassion when he composed this threnody for Jefferson Davis's bishop, for the father of three sons who could have met Mr. Longellow's son in opposing lines of gray and blue.

8 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, op. cit., III, 239.

9 Journal and Address of the Fifty-second Annual Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Mississippi held in Trinity Church, Natchez, on the 8th, 9th and 10th days of May 1870, p. 3.

POET AND PRELATE 99

When THE CHAMBER OVER THE GATE was included in the collection, ULTIMA THULE in 1880, this prayer to Apollo appeared on the title page:

Ad Apollinem Precor, integra Cum mente, nec turpem senectam Degere, nec cithara carentem. -- Horace Lib. I Carmen XXXI

The poet's perennial lines and the venerable bishop's writings give proof that this prayer was answered for both.