Courage

        I

    Happy are men who yet before they are killed
    Can let their veins run cold.
    Whom no compassion fleers
    Or makes their feet
    Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
    The front line withers,
    But they are troops who fade, not flowers
    For poets' tearful fooling:
    Men, gaps for filling
    Losses who might have fought
    Longer; but no one bothers.


        II

    And some cease feeling
    Even themselves or for themselves.
    Dullness best solves
    The tease and doubt of shelling,
    And Chance's strange arithmetic
    Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
    They keep no check on Armies' decimation.


        III

    Happy are thes...

I know not, Time and Space so intervene,
Whether, still waiting with a trust serene,
Thou bearest up thy fourscore years and ten,
Or, called at last, art now Heaven’s citizen;
But, here or there, a pleasant thought of thee,
Like an old friend, all day has been with me.
The shy, still boy, for whom thy kindly hand
Smoothed his hard pathway to the wonder-land
Of thought and fancy, in gray manhood yet
Keeps green the memory of his early debt.
To-day, when truth and falsehood speak their words
Through hot-lipped cannon and the teeth of swords,
Listening with quickened heart and ear intent
To each sharp clause of that stern argument,
I still can hear at times a softer note
Of the old pastoral music round me float,
While through the hot gleam of our civil strife

Priam's castle-walls had sunk,
Troy in dust and ashes lay,
And each Greek, with triumph drunk,
Richly laden with his prey,
Sat upon his ship's high prow,
On the Hellespontic strand,
Starting on his journey now,
Bound for Greece, his own fair land.
Raise the glad exulting shout!
Toward the land that gave them birth
Turn they now the ships about,
As they seek their native earth.

And in rows, all mournfully,
Sat the Trojan women there,
Beat their breasts in agony,
Pallid, with dishevelled hair.
In the feast of joy so glad
Mingled they the song of woe,
Weeping o'er their fortunes sad,
In their country's overthrow.
"Land beloved, oh, fare thee well!
By our foreign masters led,
Far from home we're doomed to dwell,
Ah, how hap...

Our Fathers in a wondrous age,
Ere yet the Earth was small,
Ensured to us a heritage,
And doubted not at all
That we, the children of their heart,
Which then did beat so high,
In later time should play like part
For our posterity.

A thousand years they steadfast built,
To 'vantage us and ours,
The Walls that were a world's despair,
The sea-constraining Towers:
Yet in their midmost pride they knew,
And unto Kings made known,
Not all from these their strength they drew,
Their faith from brass or stone.

Youth's passion, manhood's fierce intent,
With age's judgment wise,
They spent, and counted not they spent,
At daily sacrifice.
Not lambs alone nor purchased doves
Or tithe of trader's gold,
Their lives most dear, their de...

Ah, Postumus, we all must go:
This keen North-Easter nips my shoulder;
My strength begins to fail; I know
You find me older;

I've made my Will. Dear, faithful friend--
My Muse's friend and not my purse's!
Who still would hear and still commend
My tedious verses,

How will you live--of these deprived?
I've learned your candid soul. The venal,--
The sordid friend had scarce survived
A test so penal;

But you--Nay, nay, 'tis so. The rest
Are not as you: you hide your merit;
You, more than all, deserve the best
True friends inherit;--

Not gold,--that hearts like yours despise;
Not "spacious dirt" (your own expression),
No; but the rarer, dearer prize--
The Life's Confession!

You catch my thought? What! Can't you gues...

Kinsman beloved, and as a son, by me!
When I behold the fruit of thy regard,
The sculptured form of my old favourite bard,
I reverence feel for him, and love for thee:
Joy too and grief—much joy that there should be,
Wise men and learn’d, who grudge not to reward
With some applause my bold attempt and hard,
Which others scorn; critics by courtesy.
The grief is this, that, sunk in Homer’s mine,
I lose my precious years, now soon to fail,
Handling his gold, which, howsoe’er it shine,
Proves dross when balanced in the Christian scale.
Be wiser thou—like our forefather Donne,
Seek heavenly wealth, and work for God alone.

Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease,
If ever deed of honour did thee please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call Fame on such gentle acts as these,
And he can spred thy Name o're Lands and Seas,
What ever clime the Suns bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre,
The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre
Went to the ground: And the repeated air
Of sad Electra's Poet had the power
To save th' Athenian Walls from ruine bare.

They say that fair Romance is dead, and in her cold grave lying low,
The green grass waving o'er her head, the mould upon her breasts of snow;
Her voice, they say, is dumb for aye, that once was clarion-clear and high,
But in their hearts, their frozen hearts, they know that bitterly they lie.

Her brow of white, that was with bright rose-garland in the old days crowned,
Is now, they say, all shorn of light, and with a fatal fillet bound.
Her eyes divine no more shall shine to lead the hardy knight and good
Unto the Castle Perilous, beyond the dark Enchanted Wood.

And do they deem, these fools supreme, whose iron wheels unceasing whirr,
That, in this rushing Age of Steam, there is no longer room for her?
That, as they hold the Key of Gold that shuts or opens Mammon's Den,
R...

I.

One is a slow and melancholy maid;
I know riot if she cometh from the skies
Or from the sleepy gulfs, but she will rise
Often before me in the twilight shade,
Holding a bunch of poppies and a blade
Of springing wheat: prostrate my body lies
Before her on the turf, the while she ties
A fillet of the weed about my head;
And in the gaps of sleep I seem to hear
A gentle rustle like the stir of corn,
And words like odours thronging to my ear:
"Lie still, beloved--still until the morn;
Lie still with me upon this rolling sphere--
Still till the judgment; thou art faint and worn."

II.

The other meets me in the public throng;
Her hair streams backward from her loose attire;
She hath a trumpet and an eye of fire;
She points me downwa...

O treacherous scent, O thorny sight,
O tangle of world's wrong and right,
What art thou 'gainst my armour's gleam
But dusky cobwebs of a dream?

Beat down, deep sunk from every gleam
Of hope, they lie and dully dream;
Men once, but men no more, that Love
Their waste defeated hearts should move.

Here sleeps the world that would not love!
Let it sleep on, but if He move
Their hearts in humble wise to wait
On his new-wakened fair estate.

O won at last is never late!
Thy silence was the voice of fate;
Thy still hands conquered in the strife;
Thine eyes were light; thy lips were life.

Now lonely is the wood:
    No flower now lingers, none!
The virgin sisterhood
    Of roses, all are gone;
Now Autumn sheds her latest leaf;
And in my heart is grief.

Ah me, for all earth rears,
    The appointed bound is placed!
After a thousand years
    The great oak falls at last:
And thou, more lovely, canst not stay,
Sweet rose, beyond thy day.

Our life is not the life
    Of roses and of leaves;
Else wherefore this deep strife,
    This pain, our soul conceives?
The fall of ev'n such short-lived things
To us some sorrow brings.

And yet, plant, bird, and fly
    Feel no such hidden fire.
Happy they live; and die
    Happy, with no desire.
They in their brief life have fulfill'd
All Nature in them will'...

A storm beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.
All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.
Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.

Before a midnight breaks in storm,
Or herded sea in wrath,
Ye know what wavering gusts inform
The greater tempest's path;
Till the loosed wind
Drive all from mind,
Except Distress, which, so will prophets cry,
O'ercame them, houseless, from the unhinting sky.

Ere rivers league against the land
In piratry of flood,
Ye know what waters steal and stand
Where seldom water stood.
Yet who will note,
Till fields afloat,
And washen carcass and the returning well,
Trumpet what these poor heralds strove to tell?

Ye know who use the Crystal Ball
(To peer by stealth on Doom),
The Shade that, shaping first of all,
Prepares an empty room.
Then doth It pass
Like breath from glass,
But, on the extorted Vision bowed intent,
No man...

"Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone
Wi' the auld moone in hir arme."
'Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, Percy's Reliques.'


Once I could hail (howe'er serene the sky)
The Moon re-entering her monthly round,
No faculty yet given me to espy
The dusky Shape within her arms imbound,
That thin memento of effulgence lost
Which some have named her Predecessor's ghost.

Young, like the Crescent that above me shone,
Nought I perceived within it dull or dim;
All that appeared was suitable to One
Whose fancy had a thousand fields to skim;
To expectations spreading with wild growth,
And hope that kept with me her plighted troth.

I saw (ambition quickening at the view)
A silver boat launched on a boundless flood;
A pearly crest, like Dian's when...

Thus to be chain'd for ever, can I bear?

A very torment that, in truth, would be.

This very day my new resolve shall see.
I'll not go near the lately-worshipp'd Fair.

Yet what excuse, my heart, can I prepare

In such a case, for not consulting thee?

But courage! while our sorrows utter we
In tones where love, grief, gladness have a share.

But see! the minstrel's bidding to obey,

Its melody pours forth the sounding lyre,

Yearning a sacrifice of love to bring.

Scarce wouldst thou think it ready is the lay;

Well, but what then? Methought in the first fire

We to her presence flew, that lay to sing.

Now, dear, it isn't the bold things,
Great deeds of valour and might,
That count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day.
But it is the doing of old things,
Small acts that are just and right;
And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say;
In smiling at fate, when you want to cry, and in keeping at work when you want to play -
Dear, those are the things that count.

And, dear, it isn't the new ways
Where the wonder-seekers crowd
That lead us into the land of content, or help us to find our own.
But it is keeping to true ways,
Though the music is not so loud,
And there may be many a shadowed spot where we journey along alone;
In flinging a prayer at the face of fear, and in changing into a song a groan -
Dear, these are the thin...

In the hills' embraces holden,
    In a valley filled with glooms,
Lies a cemetery olden,
    Strewn with countless mould'ring tombs.

Ancient graves o'erhung with mosses,
    Crumbling stones, effaced and green,--
Venturesome is he who crosses,
    Night or day, the lonely scene.

Blasted trees and willow streamers,
    'Midst the terror round them spread,
Seem like awe-bound, silent dreamers
    In this garden of the dead.

One bird, anguish stricken, lingers
    In the shadow of the vale,
First and best of feathered singers,--
    'Tis the churchyard nightingale.

As from bough to bough he flutters,
    Sweetest songs of woe and wail
Through his gift divine he utters
    For the dreamers in the vale.

Listen how ...

Over the threshold of his pleasant home
Set in green clearings passed the exiled Friend,
In simple trust, misdoubting not the end.
"Dear heart of mine!" he said, "the time has come
To trust the Lord for shelter." One long gaze
The goodwife turned on each familiar thing,
The lowing kine, the orchard blossoming,
The open door that showed the hearth-fire's blaze,
And calmly answered, "Yes, He will provide."
Silent and slow they crossed the homestead's bound,
Lingering the longest by their child's grave-mound.
"Move on, or stay and hang!" the sheriff cried.
They left behind them more than home or land,
And set sad faces to an alien strand.

Safer with winds and waves than human wrath,
With ravening wolves than those whose zeal for God
Was cruelty to man, the ...