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Title: Luther A. Todd
Author: James Whitcomb Riley [
More Titles by Riley]
OBIT JULY 27, 1887, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Gifted, and loved, and praised
By every friend;
Never a murmur raised
Against him, to the end!
With tireless interest
He wrought as he thought best,--
And--lo, we bend
Where now he takes his rest!
His heart was loyal, to
Its latest thrill,
To the home-loves he knew--
And now forever will,--
Mother and brother--they
The first to pass away,--
And, lingering still,
The sister bowed to-day.
Pure as a rose might be,
And sweet, and white,
His father's memory
Was with him day and night:--
He spoke of him, as one
May now speak of the son,--
Sadly and tenderly,--
Yet as a trump had done.
Say, then, of him: He knew
Full depths of care
And stress of pain, and you
Do him scant justice there,--
Yet in the lifted face
Grief left not any trace,
Nor mark unfair,
To mar its manly grace.
It was as if each day
Some new hope dawned--
Each blessing in delay,
To him, was just beyond;
Between whiles, waiting, he
Drew pictures, cunningly--
Fantastic--fond--
Things that we laughed to see.
Sometimes, as we looked on
His crayon's work,
Some angel-face would dawn
Out radiant, from the mirk
Of features old and thin,
Or jowled with double-chin,
And eyes asmirk,
And gaping mouths agrin.
That humor in his art,
Of genius born,
Welled warmly from a heart
That could not but adorn
All things it touched with love--
The eagle, as the dove--
The burst of morn--
The night--the stars above.
Sometimes, amid the wild
Of faces queer,
A mother, with her child
Pressed warm and close to her;
This, I have thought, somehow,
The wife, with head abow,
Unreconciled,
In the great shadow now.
* * * * *
O you of sobbing breath,
Put by all sighs
Of anguish at his death--
Turn--as he turned his eyes,
In that last hour, unknown
In strange lands, all alone--
Turn thine eyes toward the skies,
And, smiling, cease thy moan.
[The end]
James Whitcomb Riley's poem: Luther A. Todd
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