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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.