From this lone breast and weary brow
Canst make, as once, its fountains play;
No, nor those gentle words that now
Support my heart to hear thee say,
The bird upon the lonely bough
Sings sweetest at the close of day.

It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding
convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race.
Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_
and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for
his belief in

The last of life for which the first was made,

as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found
its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get
the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself
at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and
Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by
their longevity.

But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and
in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the
youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems
indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the
Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's
minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition.
[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of
these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them.