Poems, now first collected/"Ergo Iris"
"ERGO IRIS"
Weary at length of the ancestral gloom,
The self-same drone, the patter of dull pens,
Nature sent Iris of the rosy plume,
Bearing to Holmes her wonder-working lens;
Grateful, he gave his dearest child her name,
Lit the shrewd East with laughter, love and tears,—
Bade halt the sun—and arching into fame
His rainbowed fancy now the world enspheres.
On his Eightieth Birthday
August 29, 1889