Quel che 'n Tessaglia ebbe le man sì pronte.

SOME HAVE WEPT FOR THEIR WORST ENEMIES, BUT LAURA DEIGNS HIM NOT A SINGLE TEAR.


    He who for empire at Pharsalia threw,
Reddening its beauteous plain with civil gore,
As Pompey's corse his conquering soldiers bore,
Wept when the well-known features met his view:
The shepherd youth, who fierce Goliath slew,
Had long rebellious children to deplore,
And bent, in generous grief, the brave Saul o'er
His shame and fall when proud Gilboa knew:
But you, whose cheek with pity never paled,
Who still have shields at hand to guard you well
Against Love's bow, which shoots its darts in vain,
Behold me by a thousand deaths assail'd,
And yet no tears of thine compassion tell,
But in those bright eyes anger an...

1.

Montgomery! true, the common lot
Of mortals lies in Lethe's wave;
Yet some shall never be forgot,
Some shall exist beyond the grave.


2.

"Unknown the region of his birth,"
The hero [2] rolls the tide of war;
Yet not unknown his martial worth,
Which glares a meteor from afar.


3.

His joy or grief, his weal or woe,
Perchance may 'scape the page of fame;
Yet nations, now unborn, will know
The record of his deathless name.


4.

The Patriot's and the Poet's frame
Must share the common tomb of all:
Their glory will not sleep the same;
'That' will arise, though Empires fall.


5.

The lustre of a Beauty's eye
Assumes the ghastly stare of death;
The ...

I have come to bury Love
Beneath a tree,
In the forest tall and black
Where none can see.

I shall put no flowers at his head,
Nor stone at his feet,
For the mouth I loved so much
Was bittersweet.

I shall go no more to his grave,
For the woods are cold.
I shall gather as much of joy
As my hands can hold.

I shall stay all day in the sun
Where the wide winds blow,
But oh, I shall cry at night
When none will know.

Well, honest John, how fare you now at home?
The spring is come, and birds are building nests;
The old cock robin to the stye is come,
With olive feathers and its ruddy breast;
And the old cock, with wattles and red comb,
Struts with the hens, and seems to like some best,
Then crows, and looks about for little crumbs,
Swept out by little folks an hour ago;
The pigs sleep in the stye; the bookman comes--
The little boy lets home-close nesting go,
And pockets tops and taws, where daisies bloom,
To look at the new number just laid down,
With lots of pictures, and good stories too,
And Jack the Giant-killer's high renown.

How dare the robins sing,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account
Have settled with the year! --
Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill,
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial.
Insulting is the sun
To him whose mortal light,
Beguiled of immortality,
Bequeaths him to the night.
In deference to him
Extinct be every hum,
Whose garden wrestles with the dew,
At daybreak overcome!

I plodded to Fairmile Hill-top, where
A maiden one fain would guard
From every hazard and every care
Advanced on the roadside sward.

I wondered how succeeding suns
Would shape her wayfarings,
And wished some Power might take such ones
Under Its warding wings.

The busy breeze came up the hill
And smartened her cheek to red,
And frizzled her hair to a haze. With a will
"Good-morning, my Dear!" I said.

She glanced from me to the far-off gray,
And, with proud severity,
"Good-morning to you - though I may say
I am not YOUR Dear," quoth she:

"For I am the Dear of one not here -
One far from his native land!" -
And she passed me by; and I did not try
To make her understand.

1901

A Master of a house, as I have read,
Must be the first man up, and last in bed.
With the sun rising he must walk his grounds;
See this, view that, and all the other bounds:
Shut every gate; mend every hedge that's torn,
Either with old, or plant therein new thorn;
Tread o'er his glebe, but with such care, that where
He sets his foot, he leaves rich compost there.

Oh bud and leaf and blossom,
    How beautiful they are!
Than last year's vernal season
    'Tis lovelier by far;
This earth was never so enchanting
    Nor half so bright before -
But so I've rhapsodized, in springtime,
    For forty years or more.

What luxury of color
    On shrub and plant and vine,
From pansies' richest purple
    To pink of eglantine;
From buttercups to "johnny-jump-ups,"
    With deep cerulean eyes,
Responding to their modest surname
    In violet surprise.

Sometimes I think the sunlight
    That gilds the emerald hills,
And makes Aladdin dwellings
    Of dingy domiciles,
Is surplus beauty overflowing
    That Heaven cannot hold -
The topaz glitter, or the jacinth,
    The glare of streets o...

Owls: they whinney down the night,
    Bats go zigzag by.
Ambushed in shadow out of sight
    The outlaws lie.

Old gods, shrunk to shadows, there
    In the wet woods they lurk,
Greedy of human stuff to snare
    In webs of murk.

Look up, else your eye must drown
    In a moving sea of black
Between the tree-tops, upside down
    Goes the sky-track.

Look up, else your feet will stray
    Towards that dim ambuscade,
Where spider-like they catch their prey
    In nets of shade.

For though creeds whirl away in dust,
    Faith fails and men forget,
These aged gods of fright and lust
    Cling to life yet.

Old gods almost dead, malign,
    Starved of their ancient dues,
Incense and fruit, fire, blood and w...

A fat young man plays with a pond.
The wind has caught itself in a tree.
The pale sky seems to be rumpled,
As though it had run out of makeup.
On long crutches, bent nearly in half
And chatting, two cripples creep across the field.
A blond poet perhaps goes mad.
A little horse stumbles over a lady.
A fat man is stuck to a window.
A boy wants to visit a soft woman.
A gray clown puts on his boots.
A baby carriage shrieks and dogs curse.

I’ve sung of Honor’s golden hair
And Hero’s auburn tresses,
Of Bella’s back abundance, where
The sun throws his caresses;
I’ve sung of curl, and coil, and braid;
On meshes I’ve dilated,
Until at last I’m sore afraid
There’s nothing re the hair of maid
That I have left unstated.

‘Twill much relieve the constant strain
Of rhyming to extol her
When on the roof of Sophie’s brain
Appears a bright cupola.
The poet’s verse will freshly run,
Effects will come much faster,
If he may tell the darling one
Her skull is glowing like the sun
And smooth as alabaster.

New stimulus the singer nerves,
When beauty, scorning switches,
Adds to her many swelling curves
A baldness that bewitches.
We’ve sung too many wigs, I swear,
And n...

    Dream not of love, to think it like
    What waking love may prove to be,
    For I dreamed so and broke my heart,
    When my false lover slighted me.

    Love, like to flowers, is sweet when green;
    The rose in bud aye best appears;
    And she that loves a handsome man
    Should have more wit than she has years.

    I put my finger in a bush,
    Thinking the sweeter rose to find;
    I pricked my finger to the bone,
    And left the sweetest rose behind.

    I threw a stone into the sea,
    And deep it sunk into the sand,
    And so did my poor heart in me
    When my false lover left the land.

    I watched the sun an hour too soon
    Set into clouds behind the town;
    So my false lover left, and said
   ...

New Year's Day at Asolo in the Trevisan

Scene. A large mean airy chamber. A girl, Pippa, from the Silk-mills, springing out of bed.


Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled,
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,
(Be they grants thou art bound to or gifts a...

    Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
    Because his children were all failures.
    But I know of a fate more trying than that:
    It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
    For I raised a brood of eagles
    Who flew away at last, leaving me
    A crow on the abandoned bough.
    Then, with the ambition to prefix
    Honorable to my name,
    And thus to win my children's admiration,
    I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,
    Spending my accumulations to win - and lost.
    That fall my daughter received first prize in
    Paris For her picture, entitled, "The Old Mill" -
    (It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)
    The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.

I

Beneath the concave of an April sky,
When all the fields with freshest green were dight,
Appeared, in presence of the spiritual eye
That aids or supersedes our grosser sight,
The form and rich habiliments of One
Whose countenance bore resemblance to the sun,
When it reveals, in evening majesty,
Features half lost amid their own pure light.
Poised like a weary cloud, in middle air
He hung, then floated with angelic ease
(Softening that bright effulgence by degrees)
Till he had reached a summit sharp and bare,
Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noontide breeze.
Upon the apex of that lofty cone
Alighted, there the Stranger stood alone;
Fair as a gorgeous Fabric of the east
Suddenly raised by some enchanter's power,
Where nothing was; and ...

Soon as the twilight through the distant mist
In silver hemmings skirts the purple east,
Ere yet the sun unveils his smiles to view
And dries the morning's chilly robes of dew,
Young Hodge the horse-boy, with a soodly gait,
Slow climbs the stile, or opes the creaky gate,
With willow switch and halter by his side
Prepared for Dobbin, whom he means to ride;
The only tune he knows still whistling oer,
And humming scraps his father sung before,
As "Wantley Dragon," and the "Magic Rose,"
The whole of music that his village knows,
Which wild remembrance, in each little town,
From mouth to mouth through ages handles down.
Onward he jolls, nor can the minstrel-throngs
Entice him once to listen to their songs;
Nor marks he once a blossom on his way;
A senseless lu...

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!

The rosy day was sweet and young,
The clod-brown lark that hail'd the morn
Had just her summer anthem sung,
And trembling dropped in the corn;
The dew-rais'd flower was perk and proud,
The butterfly around it play'd;
The sky's blue clear, save woolly cloud
That pass'd the sun without a shade.

On the pismire's castle hill,
While the burnet-buttons quak'd,
While beside the stone-pav'd rill
Cowslip bunches nodding shak'd,
Bees in every peep did try,
Great had been the honey shower,
Soon their load was on their thigh,
Yellow dust as fine as flour.

Brazen magpies, fond of clack,
Full of insolence and pride,
Chattering on the donkey's back
Perch'd, and pull'd his shaggy hide;
Odd crows settled on the path,
Dames from milking trot...