There, at the table's further end I see In his old place our Poet's vis-à-vis, The great PROFESSOR, strong, broad-shouldered, square, In life's rich noontide, joyous, debonair. His social hour no leaden care alloys, His laugh rings loud and mirthful as a boy's,— That lusty laugh the Puritan forgot,— What ear has heard it and remembers not? How often, halting at some wide crevasse Amid the windings of his Alpine pass, High up the cliffs, the climbing mountaineer, Listening the far-off avalanche to hear, Silent, and leaning on his steel-shod staff, Has heard that cheery voice, that ringing laugh, From the rude cabin whose nomadic walls Creep with the moving glacier as it crawls!   How does vast Nature lead her living train In ordered sequence through that spacious brain, As in the primal hour when Adam named The new-born tribes that young creation claimed!— How will her realm be darkened, losing thee, Her darling, whom we call our AGASSIZ!

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "  There, at the table's further end I see In his old place our Poet's vis-à-vis, The great PROFESSOR, strong, broad-shouldered, square, In life's rich noontide, joyous, debonair. His social hour no leaden care alloys, His laugh rings loud and mirthful as a boy's,— That lusty laugh the Puritan forgot,— What ear has heard it and remembers not? How often, halting at some wide crevasse Amid the windings of his Alpine pass, High up the cliffs, the climbing mountaineer, Listening the far-off avalanche to hear, Silent, and leaning on his steel-shod staff, Has heard that cheery voice, that ringing laugh, From the rude cabin whose nomadic walls Creep with the moving glacier as it crawls!   How does vast Nature lead her living train In ordered sequence through that spacious brain, As in the primal hour when Adam named The new-born tribes that young creation claimed!— How will her realm be darkened, losing thee, Her darling, whom we call our AGASSIZ!" in the context of "Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. "At the Saturday Club" (1884) as quoted in The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes: In Three Volumes (1895) Vol.3 p. 122" to mean that wisdom is timeless.