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Page 402 of 1621

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Page 402 of 1621

To Sappho.

Let us now take time and play,
Love, and live here while we may;
Drink rich wine, and make good cheer,
While we have our being here;
For once dead and laid i' th' grave,
No return from thence we have.

Robert Herrick

The "Mary Gloster"

I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim,
Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!
Good for a fortnight, am I? The doctor told you? He lied.
I shall go under by morning, and, Put that nurse outside.
'Never seen death yet, Dickie? Well, now is your time to learn,
And you'll wish you held my record before it comes to your turn.
Not counting the Line and the Foundry, the yards and the village, too,
I've made myself and a million; but I'm damned if I made you.
Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three,
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll, and forty freighters at seal
Fifty years between'em, and every year of it fight,
And now I'm Sir Anthony Gloster, dying, a baronite:
For I lunched with his Royal 'Ighness, what was it the pape...

Rudyard

Deeds.

'Tis well with words, oh masters, ye have sought
To turn men's yearning to the great and true,
Yet first take heed to what your own hands do;
By deeds not words the souls of men are taught;
Good lives alone are fruitful; they are caught
Into the fountain of all life (wherethrough
Men's souls that drink are broken or made new)
Like drops of heavenly elixir, fraught
With the clear essence of eternal youth.
Even one little deed of weak untruth
Is like a drop of quenchless venom cast,
A liquid thread, into life's feeding stream,
Woven forever with its crystal gleam,
Bearing the seed of death and woe at last.

Archibald Lampman

Adam

After W. W.

An adventure of the Author's, and one designed to show that grievances may be met with in the cottages of the humblest, and may take the most unexpected forms.


When in my white-washed walls confined
Till eve her freedom brings,
I often turn a musing mind
To think awhile of things,

And thus about the noontide glow
To-day my thoughts recalled
Old Adam, whom I once did know,
A dear old thing, though bald.

A village Gravedigger was he
With Newgate fringe of grey,
The only man that one could see
At work on Saturday!

For on those evenings (which provide
A due release to toil)
He shovelled wearily, and plied
His task upon the soil.

Therein a sorrow Adam had,
And when he knew me well
He t...

John Kendall (Dum-Dum)

Stanzas In Memory Of The Author Of 'Obermann'

In front the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.

Behind are the abandoned baths
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone

The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar.
Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more.

I turn thy leaves! I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.

Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe'er thou art,
Condemned to cast about,
All shipwreck in thy own weak heart,
For comfort from without!

A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spir...

Matthew Arnold

The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty - A Dream

I would I could weave in
The colour, the wonder,
The song I conceive in
My heart while I ponder,

And show how it came like
The magi of old
Whose chant was a flame like
The dawn's voice of gold;

Who dreams followed near them
A murmur of birds,
And ear still could hear them
Unchanted in words.

In words I can only
Reveal thee my heart,
Oh, Light of the Lonely,
The shining impart.

Between the twilight and the dark
The lights danced up before my eyes:
I found no sleep or peace or rest,
But dreams of stars and burning skies.

I knew the faces of the day--
Dream faces, pale, with cloudy hair,
I know you not nor yet your home,
The Fount of Shadowy Beauty, where?

...

George William Russell

The Song Of Lamech

Hearken to me, ye mothers of my tent:
Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech:
Adah, let Jubal hither lead his goats:
And Tubal Cain, O Zillah, hush the forge;
Naamah her wheel shall ply beside, and thou,
My Jubal, touch, before I speak, the string.
Yea, Jubal, touch, before I speak, the string.
Hear ye my voice, beloved of my tent,
Dear ones of Lamech, listen to my speech.

For Eve made answer, Cain, my son, my own,
O, if I cursed thee, O my child, I sinned,
And He that heard me, heard, and said me nay:
My first, my only, one, thou shalt not go;
And Adam answered also, Cain, my son,
He that is gone forgiveth, we forgive:
Rob not thy mother of two sons at once;
My child, abide with us and comfort us.

Hear ye my voice; Adah and Zillah, hear;

Arthur Hugh Clough

The Two Cousins

Valour and Innocence
Have latterly gone hence
To certain death by certain shame attended.
Envy, ah! even to tears!,
The fortune of their years
Which, though so few, yet so divinely ended.

Scarce had they lifted up
Life’s full and fiery cup,
Than they had set it down untouched before them.
Before their day arose
They beckoned it to close,
Close in destruction and confusion o’er them.

They did not stay to ask
What prize should crown their task,
Well sure that prize was such as no man strives for;
But passed into eclipse,
Her kiss upon their lips,
Even Belphoebe’s, whom they gave their lives for!

Rudyard

Preface To The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots

Not mine to let the hair grow long, and talk
In raptured accents of the Higher Things,
Of all the purple Polyanthus bears,
And beating wings.
(Oh no! Nothing of that sort!)

Ne'er have I languished on the lower slopes
Of sweet Parnassus in the thrice-dead years,
Chanting in fathoms of the fathomless
To kindred ears.
(Certainly not! No time for it!)

Nor mine the gift-O, gilded gift and grand!
To linger near the murmur of the Nine,
To mouth in music of the meaningless,
Nay! Never mine!
(That's so! Quite!)

But here to han'le the auld crambo-clink
On hame-owre themes weel-kent by Galen's tribe,
Regairdless o' what ither fowk may think
Or ca' the scribe!
(Ay! That's aboot it noo!)

David Rorie

September Dark

1
The air falls chill;
The whippoorwill
Pipes lonesomely behind the Hill:
The dusk grows dense,
The silence tense;
And lo, the katydids commence.

2
Through shadowy rifts
Of woodland lifts
The low, slow moon, and upward drifts,
While left and right
The fireflies' light
Swirls eddying in the skirts of Night.

3
O Cloudland gray
And level lay
Thy mists across the face of Day!
At foot and head,
Above the dead
O Dews, weep on uncomforted!

James Whitcomb Riley

Mid-Winter

All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
Harsh as an iron landscape of wan hell
The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
My window wailing: now a little child
Crying outside my door; and now the long
Howl of some starved beast down the flue. I sat
And knew 'twas Winter with his madman song
Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.

Madison Julius Cawein

Orestes

Me in far lands did Justice call, cold queen
Among the dead, who after heat and haste
At length have leisure for her steadfast voice,
That gathers peace from the great deeps of hell.
She call'd me, saying: 'I heard a cry by night!
Go thou, and question not; within thy halls
My will awaits fulfilment. Lo, the dead
Cries out before me in the under-world.
Seek not to justify thyself: in me
Be strong, and I will show thee wise in time;
For, though my face be dark, yet unto those
Who truly follow me through storm or shine,
For these the veil shall fall, and they shall see
They walked with Wisdom, though they knew her not.'
So sped I home; and from the under-world
Forever came a wind that fill'd my sails,
Cold, like a spirit! and ever her still voice
Spoke over...

Stephen Phillips

Orestes

Me in far lands did Justice call, cold queen
Among the dead, who after heat and haste
At length have leisure for her steadfast voice,
That gathers peace from the great deeps of hell.
She call'd me, saying: 'I heard a cry by night!
Go thou, and question not; within thy halls
My will awaits fulfilment. Lo, the dead
Cries out before me in the under-world.
Seek not to justify thyself: in me
Be strong, and I will show thee wise in time;
For, though my face be dark, yet unto those
Who truly follow me through storm or shine,
For these the veil shall fall, and they shall see
They walked with Wisdom, though they knew her not.'
So sped I home; and from the under-world
Forever came a wind that fill'd my sails,
Cold, like a spirit! and ever her still voice
Spoke over...

Stephen Phillips

Autumn.

    As a harvester, at dusk,
Faring down some woody trail
Leading homeward through the musk
Of may-apple and pawpaw,
Hazel-bush, and spice and haw, -
So comes Autumn, swart and hale,
Drooped of frame and slow of stride.
But withal an air of pride
Looming up in stature far
Higher than his shoulders are;
Weary both in arm and limb,
Yet the wholesome heart of him
Sheer at rest and satisfied.

Greet him as with glee of drums
And glad cymbals, as he comes!
Robe him fair, O Rain and Shine.
He the Emperor - the King -
Royal lord of everything
Sagging Plenty's granary floors
And out-bulging all her doors;
He the god of corn and wine,
Honey, milk, and fruit...

James Whitcomb Riley

Sonnet: - XV.

Last night I heard the plaintive whippoorwill,
And straightway Sorrow shot his swiftest dart.
I know not why, but it has chilled my heart
Like some dread thing of evil. All night long
My nerves were shaken, and my pulse stood still,
And waited for a terror yet to come
To strike harsh discords through my life's sweet song.
Sleep came - an incubus that filled the sum
Of wretchedness with dreams so wild and chill
The sweat oozed from me like great drops of gall;
An evil spirit kept my mind in thrall,
And rolled my body up like a poor scroll
On which is written curses that the soul
Shrinks back from when it sees some hellish carnival.

Charles Sangster

At The Play.

The poet painted a woman's soul,
Human, trusting and kind,
And then he drew the soul of a man,
Brutal and base and blind;

And the woman loved in the old, old way,
And the man in the way of men,
And the poet christened their lives "A Play,"
And he sat down to watch it, and then ...

A woman rose with a bitter laugh,
And her eyes were as dry as stone
As she bowed her head at the poet's stall
And said in a strange, cold tone:

"He paints the best who has dipped his brush
In the heart's own blood, they say;
You took my love and you took my life,
But you gave the world--a play!"

Charles Hamilton Musgrove

The Crowing Of The Red Cock.

Across the Eastern sky has glowed
The flicker of a blood-red dawn,
Once more the clarion cock has crowed,
Once more the sword of Christ is drawn.
A million burning rooftrees light
The world-wide path of Israel's flight.


Where is the Hebrew's fatherland?
The folk of Christ is sore bestead;
The Son of Man is bruised and banned,
Nor finds whereon to lay his head.
His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
His passion lasts a thousand years.


Each crime that wakes in man the beast,
Is visited upon his kind.
The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,
The tyranny of kings, combined
To root his seed from earth again,
His record is one cry of pain.


When the long roll of Christian guilt
Against his sires and kin is known,
The...

Emma Lazarus

Life

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in,
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,
And never a laugh but the moans come double;
And that is life!

A crust and a corner that love makes precious,
With a smile to warm and the tears to refresh us;
And joy seems sweeter when cares come after,
And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter;
And that is life!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Page 402 of 1621

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Page 402 of 1621