Nature

    Away, away, from the sultry ways
        Where the pleasures fall and fade,
    To the bannered corn and the meadowed bloom
        And the forest's cooling shade!

    Afar, afar, from the rooms of care
        With the toils of life distressed,
    To the grassy hills and the fragrant slopes
        And the quiet vales of rest!

    Away from the weary, dusty town,
        Where the sorrows dim the days,
    To the sleeping lake and the silent stream
        And the wildwood's tangled ways!

    To margins wide of the woodland pools,
        Where the wild birds troll their songs,
    Where the lilies laugh and the willows wave,
        And the pleasures dance in throngs!

    The dark-eyed nymphs and the fairy elves
        In t...

Behold! a new white world!
        The falling snow
Has cloaked the last old year
        And bid him go.

To-morrow! cries the oak-tree
        To his heart,
My sealèd buds shall fling
        Their leaves apart.

To-morrow! pipes the robin,
        And again
How sweet the nest that long
        Was full of rain.

To-morrow! bleats the sheep,
        And one by one
My little lambs shall frolic
        ’Neath the sun.

For us, too, let some fair
        To-morrow be,
O Thou who weavest threads
        Of Destiny!

Thou wast a babe on that
        Far Christmas Day,
Let us as children follow
        In Thy way.

So that our hearts grown cold
        ’Neath time and pain,
With young ...

A glint of her hair or a flash of her shoulder,
That is the most I can boast to have seen,
Then all is lost as the shadows enfold her,
Forest glades making a screen of their green,
Could I cast off all the cares of tomorrow,
Could I forget all the fret of today
Then, my heart free from the burdens I borrow,
Nature’s chaste spirit her face would display.

Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion youth's first fiery glow,
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!

Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,
Mark how ...

There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,
Which to this day stands single, in the midst
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore:
Not loathe to furnish weapons for the Bands
Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched
To Scotland's heaths; or those that crossed the sea
And drew their sounding bows at Azincour,
Perhaps at earlier Crecy, or Poictiers.
Of vast circumference and gloom profound
This solitary Tree! a living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed. But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveteratley convolved,
Nor uninformed wi...

Below the sunset's range of rose,
Below the heaven's deepening blue,
Down woodways where the balsam blows,
And milkweed tufts hang, gray with dew,
A Jersey heifer stops and lows
The cows come home by one, by two.

There is no star yet: but the smell
Of hay and pennyroyal mix
With herb aromas of the dell,
Where the root-hidden cricket clicks:
Among the ironweeds a bell
Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks.

She waits upon the slope beside
The windlassed well the plum trees shade,
The well curb that the goose-plums hide;
Her light hand on the bucket laid,
Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed,
Her gown as simple as her braid.

She sees fawn-colored backs among
The sumacs now; a tossing horn
Its clashing bell of copper rung:
...

This cool quiet of trees
In the grey dusk of the north,
In the green half-dusk of the west,
Where fires still glow;
These glimmering fantasies
Of foliage branching forth
And drooping into rest;
Ye lovers, know
That in your wanderings
Beneath this arching brake
Ye must attune your love
To hushed words.
For here is the dreaming wisdom of
The unmovable things...
And more: - walk softly, lest ye wake
A thousand sleeping birds.

    Ah! little lake, though fair thou art,
        A sapphire flashing to the sky,
        Thy charm is only for the eye,
    Thy beauty cannot hold my heart.

    Green hill-sides bending to thy shore
        Gleam clear in the autumnal light,
        While far above, Monadnock's height
    Keeps rugged guard thy waters o'er.

    And yet these very beauties cloy;
        As in a prison I am bound,
        Though fair the walls that gird me round,
    My housemate is no longer joy.

    Thy loveliness breeds discontent,
        For far my foolish heart would be,
        It longs for the unquiet sea,
    And with desire is sorely rent.

    Hateful the walls that me debar
        From happier things that haunt me so,
        Even ...

I

Looking forward to the spring
One puts up with anything.
On this February day,
Though the winds leap down the street,
Wintry scourgings seem but play,
And these later shafts of sleet
Sharper pointed than the first -
And these later snows the worst -
Are as a half-transparent blind
Riddled by rays from sun behind.

II

Shadows of the October pine
Reach into this room of mine:
On the pine there stands a bird;
He is shadowed with the tree.
Mutely perched he bills no word;
Blank as I am even is he.
For those happy suns are past,
Fore-discerned in winter last.
When went by their pleasure, then?
I, alas, perceived not when.

I think of the slope where the rabbits fed,
Of the periwinks' rockwork lair,
Of the fuchsias ringing their bells of red -
And the something else seen there.

Between the blooms where the sod basked bright,
By the bobbing fuchsia trees,
Was another and yet more eyesome sight -
The sight that richened these.

I shall seek those beauties in the spring,
When the days are fit and fair,
But only as foils to the one more thing
That also will flower there!

Your peaks are beautiful, ye Apennines!
In the soft light of these serenest skies;
From the broad highland region, black with pines,
Fair as the hills of Paradise they rise,
Bathed in the tint Peruvian slaves behold
In rosy flushes on the virgin gold.

There, rooted to the aërial shelves that wear
The glory of a brighter world, might spring
Sweet flowers of heaven to scent the unbreathed air,
And heaven's fleet messengers might rest the wing,
To view the fair earth in its summer sleep,
Silent, and cradled by the glimmering deep.

Below you lie men's sepulchres, the old
Etrurian tombs, the graves of yesterday;
The herd's white bones lie mixed with human mould,
Yet up the radiant steeps that I survey
Death never climbed, nor life's soft breath, with pa...

The time of gifts has come again,
And, on my northern window-pane,
Outlined against the day’s brief light,
A Christmas token hangs in sight.

The wayside travellers, as they pass,
Mark the gray disk of clouded glass;
And the dull blankness seems, perchance,
Folly to their wise ignorance.

They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;
For there the flower, whose fringes through
The frosty breath of autumn blew,
Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.

So from the trodden ways of earth,
Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
And offer to the careless glance
The clouding gray of circumstance.
They blossom be...

Let those who will stride on their barren roads
And prick themselves to haste with self-made goads,
Unheeding, as they struggle day by day,
If flowers be sweet or skies be blue or gray:
For me, the lone, cool way by purling brooks,
The solemn quiet of the woodland nooks,
A song-bird somewhere trilling sadly gay,
A pause to pick a flower beside the way.

Of these years I sing,
How they pass and have pass'd, through convuls'd pains as through parturitions;
How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfillment, the Absolute Success, despite of people Illustrates evil as well as good;
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity;
How few see the arrived models, the Athletes, the Western States or see freedom or spirituality or hold any faith in results,
(But I see the Athletes and I see the results of the war glorious and inevitable and they again leading to other results;)
How the great cities appear How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, as I love them;
How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding, keep on and on;

All, thou gentle one, lies embraced in thy kingdom; the graybeard
Back to the days of his youth, childish and child-like, returns.

    Mostly in a dull rotation
    We bear our loads and eat and drink and sleep.
    Feeling no tears, knowing no meditation,
    Too tired to think, too clogged with earth to weep.

    Dimly convinced, poor groping wretches,
    Like eyeless insects in a murky pond
    That out and out this city stretches,
    Away, away, and there is no beyond.

    No larger earth, no loftier heaven,
    No cleaner, gentler airs to breathe.    And yet,
    Even to us sometimes is given
    Visions of things we other times forget.

    Some day is done, its labour ended,
    And as we sit and brood at windows high,
    A steady wind from far descended,
    Blows off the filth that hid the deeper sky;

    There are the empty waiting spaces,
    We w...

I.

There is a field, that leans upon two hills,
Foamed o'er of flowers and twinkling with clear rills;
That in its girdle of wild acres bears
The anodyne of rest that cures all cares;
Wherein soft wind and sun and sound are blent
With fragrance as in some old instrument
Sweet chords; calm things, that Nature's magic spell
Distills from Heaven's azure crucible,
And pours on Earth to make the sick mind well.
There lies the path, they say
Come away! come away!

II.

There is a forest, lying 'twixt two streams,
Sung through of birds and haunted of dim dreams;
That in its league-long hand of trunk and leaf
Lifts a green wand that charms away all grief;
Wrought of quaint silence and the stealth of things,
Vague, whispering touches, gleams a...

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles w...