ld he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find him.
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--
Properly based Oun-- 130
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:

This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there? 140
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily Iying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

NOTES:
"A Grammarian's Funeral" is an elegy of a typical pioneer
scholar of the Renaissance period, sung by the leader of
the chorus of disciples, and interspersed with parenthetical
directions to them, while they all bear the body of
their master to its appropriate burial-place on the highest
mountain-peak. A humorous sense of disproportion in
the labors of devoted scholarship to its results heightens
their exaltation of the dead humanist's indomitable trust
in the supremacy of the immaterial.

86. Calculus: the stone.

88. Tussis: a cough.

95. Hydroptic: dropsical.

129. Hoti: Greek particle, conjunction, that.

130. Oun: Greek particle, then, now then.

131. Enclitic De: Greek, concerning which Browning
wrote to the Editor of The News, London, Nov. 21,
1874: "In a clever article you speak of 'the doctrine of
the enclitic De--which, with all deference to Mr.
Browning, in point of fact, does not exist.' No, not to
Mr. Browning, but pray defer to Herr Buttmann, whose
fifth list of 'enclitics' ends with the inseparable De,'--
or to Curtius