Explore "A Grammarian's Funeral" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Shortly After the Revival of Learning in Europe
Let us begin and carry up this corpse, / Singing together. / Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes / Each in its tether / Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, / Cared-for till cock-crow: / Look out if yonder be not day again / Rimming the rock-row! / That 's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, / Rarer, intenser, / Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, / Chafes in the censer. / Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; / Seek we sepulture / On a tall mountain, citied to the top, / Crowded with culture! / All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; / Clouds overcome it; / No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's / Circling its summit. / Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights; / Wait ye the warning? / Our low life was the level's and the night's; / He 's for the morning. / Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, / 'Ware the beholders! / This is our master, famous, calm and dead, / Borne on our shoulders.