7.
Then followed a throng to memory dear,
Of writers more modern in age,
Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died the same year,
And Chaucer, and Bacon the sage.

8.
Immortal the laurels that decked the fair throng,
And Dante moved by with his lyre,
While Montaigne and Pascal stood rapt by his song,
And Boccaccio paused to admire.

9.
Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm,
While Milton and Sidney were there,
Pope, Dryden, and Moliere added their charm,
And Bunyan, and Marlowe so rare.

10.
Then Gibbon stalked by in classical guise,
And Hume, and Macaulay, and Froude,
While Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall looked wise,
And Humboldt and Comte near them stood.

11.
Dean Swift looked sardonic on Addison's face,
And Johnson tipped Boswell a wink,
Walter Scott and Jane Austen hobnobbed o'er a glass,
And Goethe himself deigned to drink.

12.
Robert Burns followed next with Thomas Carlyle,
Jean Paul paired with Coleridge, too,
While De Foe elbowed Goldsmith, the master of style,
And Fielding and Schiller made two.

13.
Rousseau with his eloquent, marvellous style,
And Voltaire, with his keen, witty pen,
Victor Hugo so grand, though repellent the while,
And Dumas and Balzac again.

14.
Dear Thackeray came in his happiest mood,
And stayed until midnight was done,
Bulwer-Lytton, and Reade, and Kingsley and Hood,
And Dickens, the master of fun.

15.
George Eliot, too, with her matter-full page,
And Byron, and Browning, and Keats,
While Shelley and Tennyson joined youth and age,
And Wordsworth the circle completes.

16.
Then followed a group of America's best,
With Irving, and Bryant, and Holmes,
While Bancroft and Motley unite with the rest,
And Thoreau with Whittier comes.

17.
With his Raven in hand dreamed on Edgar Poe,
And Longfellow sweet and serene,
While Prescott, and Ticknor, and Emerson too,
And Hawthorne and Lowell were seen.

18.
While thus the assembly of witty and wise
Rejoiced the librarian's sight,
Ere the