"WASHINGTON, D.C., 5 April, 1862."
With the foregoing came another poem, "In Commemoration of a Silver
Wedding," October 2, 1863, full of tenderness and pleasantry,--the
wedding of Mr. and Mrs. J. Pierpont Lord.
And on his eighty-first birthday, called by a strange mistake his
eightieth, there was another celebration, yet more solemn and affecting,
where the greetings and congratulations of his brother-poets, all over
the land, were sent to him and published in the newspapers of the day.
Among his later poems, the "E Pluribus Unum" appears to me most worthy
of his reputation, and least like the doings of his early manhood.
And now, though we had little reason to look for the prolongation of
such a life;--a continued miracle from the age of thirty or thirty-five,
after which he built himself up anew, by living as well in cold water as
in hot, and luxuriating in cold baths, and working hard,--harder,
perhaps, on the whole, at downright drudgery, than any other man of his
age, like Rousseau in copying music, as a relief from writing
poetry,--yet when death happens we are all taken by surprise, just as if
we thought God had overlooked his aged servant, or made him an exception
to the great, inflexible law of our being; or as if a whisper had
reached us, saying, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that
to thee?"
But enough; a volume of such memoranda would be far short of what such a
man deserves when he is finally translated.
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