As a guest who may not stay
Long and sad farewells to say
Glides with smiling face away,

Of the sweetness and the zest
Of thy happy life possessed
Thou hast left us at thy best.

Warm of heart and clear of brain,
Of thy sun-bright spirit's wane
Thou hast spared us all the pain.

Now that thou hast gone away,
What is left of one to say
Who was open as the day?

What is there to gloss or shun?
Save with kindly voices none
Speak thy name beneath the sun.

Safe thou art on every side,
Friendship nothing finds to hide,
Love's demand is satisfied.

Over manly strength and worth,
At thy desk of toil, or hearth,
Played the lambent light of mirth,

Mirth that lit, but never burned;
All thy blame to pity ...

Ah, haughty hills, sardonic solitudes,
What wizard touch hath, crowning you with gold,
Cast Tyrian purple o'er broad-shouldered woods,
And to your pride anointed empire sold
For wan traditioned death, whose misty moods
Shake each huge throne of quarried shadows cold?

Now where the agate-foliaged forests sleep,
Bleak briars are ruby-berried, and the brush
Flames - when the winds armsful of motion heap
In wincing gusts upon it - amber blush;
The beech an inner beryle breaks from deep
Encrusting topaz of a sullen flush.

Dead gold, dead bronze, dull amethystine rose,
Rose cameo, in day's gray, somber spar
Of smoky quartz - intaglioed beauty - glows
Luxuriance of color. Trunks that are
Vast organs antheming the winds' wild woes
A faded sun and pale...

Where Harpur lies, the rainy streams,
And wet hill-heads, and hollows weeping,
Are swift with wind, and white with gleams,
And hoarse with sounds of storms unsleeping.

Fit grave it is for one whose song
Was tuned by tones he caught from torrents,
And filled with mountain breaths, and strong,
Wild notes of falling forest currents.

So let him sleep, the rugged hymns
And broken lights of woods above him!
And let me sing how sorrow dims
The eyes of those that used to love him.

As April in the wilted wold
Turns faded eyes on splendours waning,
What time the latter leaves are old,
And ruin strikes the strays remaining;

So we that knew this singer dead,
Whose hands attuned the harp Australian,
May set the face and bow the head,
...

Why fear to die
And let thy body lie
Under the flowers of June,
Thy body food
For the ground-worms' brood
And thy grave smiled on by the visiting moon.

Amid great Nature's halls
Girt in by mountain walls
And washed with waterfalls
It would please me to die,
Where every wind that swept my tomb
Goes loaded with a free perfume
Dealt out with a God's charity.

I should like to die in sweets,
A hill's leaves for winding-sheets,
And the searching sun to see
That I am laid with decency.
And the commissioned wind to sing
His mighty psalm from fall to spring
And annual tunes commemorate
Of Nature's child the common fate.

WILLIAMSTOWN, VERMONT, 1 June, 1831.

The linnet's warble, sinking towards a close,
Hints to the thrush 'tis time for their repose;
The shrill-voiced thrush is heedless, and again
The monitor revives his own sweet strain;
But both will soon be mastered, and the copse
Be left as silent as the mountain-tops,
Ere some commanding star dismiss to rest
The throng of rooks, that now, from twig or nest,
(After a steady flight on home-bound wings,
And a last game of mazy hoverings
Around their ancient grove) with cawing noise
Disturb the liquid music's equipoise.

O Nightingale! Who ever heard thy song
Might here be moved, till Fancy grows so strong
That listening sense is pardonably cheated
Where wood or stream by thee was never greeted.
Surely, from fairest spots of favoured lands,
Were not som...

Sweet evening comes, friend of the criminal,
Like an accomplice with a light footfall;
The sky shuts on itself as though a tomb,
And man turns beast within his restless room.

o evening, night, so wished for by the one
Whose honest, weary arms can say: We've done
Our work today! The night will bring relief
To spirits who consume themselves with grief,
The scholar who is bowed with heavy head,
The broken worker falling into bed.
Meanwhile, corrupting demons of the air
Slowly wake up like men of great affairs,
And, flying, bump our shutters and our eaves.
Against the glimmerings teased by the breeze
Old Prostitution blazes in the streets;
She opens out her nest-of-ants retreat;
Everywhere she clears the secret routes,
A stealthy force preparing for a c...

L' alma mia fiamma oltra le belle bella.

HE ACKNOWLEDGES THE WISDOM OF HER PAST COLDNESS TO HIM.


    My noble flame--more fair than fairest are
Whom kind Heaven here has e'er in favour shown--
Before her time, alas for me! has flown
To her celestial home and parent star.
I seem but now to wake; wherein a bar
She placed on passion 'twas for good alone,
As, with a gentle coldness all her own,
She waged with my hot wishes virtuous war.
My thanks on her for such wise care I press,
That with her lovely face and sweet disdain
She check'd my love and taught me peace to gain.
O graceful artifice! deserved success!
I with my fond verse, with her bright eyes she,
Glory in her, she virtue got in me.

MACGREGOR.

Where yesterday rolled long waves of gold
Beneath the burnished blue of the sky,
A silver-white sea lies still and cold,
And a bitter wind blows by.

But nothing passes the door all day,
Though my watching eyes grow worn and dim,
Save a lean, grey wolf that swings away
To the far horizon rim.

Then, one by one, the stars glisten out
Like frozen tears on a purple pall -
The darkness folds my cabin about
And the snow begins to fall.

I will make a hearth-fire red and bright
And set a light by the window pane
For one who follows the trail to-night
That will bring him home again.

Love will ride with him my heart to bless -
Joy will out-step him across the floor -
What matters the great white loneliness
When we bar the cabin door...

As I lay awake at night-time
In an ancient country barrack known to ancient cannoneers,
And recalled the hopes that heralded each seeming brave and bright time
Of my primal purple years,

Much it haunted me that, nigh there,
I had borne my bitterest loss - when One who went, came not again;
In a joyless hour of discord, in a joyless-hued July there -
A July just such as then.

And as thus I brooded longer,
With my faint eyes on the feeble square of wan-lit window frame,
A quick conviction sprung within me, grew, and grew yet stronger,
That the month-night was the same,

Too, as that which saw her leave me
On the rugged ridge of Waterstone, the peewits plaining round;
And a lapsing twenty years had ruled that - as it were to grieve me -
I should near ...

Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been fill'd with flowers;
And ye the walks have been
Where maids have spent their hours.

You have beheld how they
With wicker arks did come,
To kiss and bear away
The richer cowslips home.

You've heard them sweetly sing,
And seen them in a round;
Each virgin, like a spring,
With honeysuckles crown'd.

But now, we see none here,
Whose silvery feet did tread
And with dishevell'd hair
Adorn'd this smoother mead.

Like unthrifts, having spent
Your stock, and needy grown
You're left here to lament
Your poor estates alone.

Herr Weiser! Three-score-years-and-ten,
A hale white rose of his country-men,
Transplanted here in the Hoosier loam,
And blossomy as his German home -
As blossomy and as pure and sweet
As the cool green glen of his calm retreat,
Far withdrawn from the noisy town
Where trade goes clamoring up and down,
Whose fret and fever, and stress and strife,
May not trouble his tranquil life!

Breath of rest, what a balmy gust!
Quite of the city's heat and dust,
Jostling down by the winding road,
Through the orchard ways of his quaint abode.
Tether the horse, as we onward fare
Under the pear-trees trailing there,
And thumping the wood bridge at night
With lumps of ripeness and lush delight,
Till the stream, as it maunders on till dawn,
Is powdered and p...

I.

Long vollies of wind and of rain
And the rain on the drizzled pane,
And the eve falls chill and murk;
But on yesterday's eve I know
How a horned moon's thorn-like bow
Stabbed rosy thro' gold and thro' glow,
Like a rich barbaric dirk.


II.

Now thick throats of the snapdragons, -
Who hold in their hues cool dawns,
Which a healthy yellow paints, -
Are filled with a sweet rain fine
Of a jaunty, jubilant shine,
A faery vat of rare wine,
Which the honey thinly taints.


III.

Now dabble the poppies shrink,
And the coxcomb and the pink;
While the candytuft's damp crown
Droops dribbled, low bowed i' the wet;
And long spikes o' the mignonette
Little musk-sacks open set,
Which the dripping o' de...

"My house is thatched with violet leaves
And paved with daisies fine,
Scarlet berries droop over its eaves,
Tall grasses round it shine;
With softest down I have lined my nest,
Securely now will I sit and rest.

"When their wings break from their silvery shell,
Touched by my tender care,
Here shall my little ones safely dwell,
Little ones soft and fair;
Some summer morn they shall try their wings
While their father sits by my side and sings."

Hard by, just over the streamlet's edge
A great rock towered in might,
High up, half hidden in moss and sedge,
Were safe little nooks and bright;
Ah well for the bird with her tender breast,
Had she flown to the rock to build her nest!

Poor bird, she built her nest too low;
Alas! for the bi...

The winds have talked with him confidingly;
The trees have whispered to him; and the night
Hath held him gently as a mother might,
And taught him all sad tones of melody:
The mountains have bowed to him; and the sea,
In clamorous waves, and murmurs exquisite,
Hath told him all her sorrow and delight -
Her legends fair - her darkest mystery.
His verse blooms like a flower, night and day;
Bees cluster round his rhymes; and twitterings
Of lark and swallow, in an endless May,
Are mingling with the tender songs he sings.
Nor shall he cease to sing - in every lay
Of Nature's voice he sings - and will alway.

When winter winds are piercing chill
    And through the hawthorn blows the gale,
With solemn feet I tread the hill,
    That overbrows the lonely vale.

O'er the bare upland, and away
    Through the long reach of desert woods,
The embracing sunbeams chastely play,
    And gladden these deep solitudes.

Where, twisted round the barren oak,
    The summer vine in beauty clung,
And summer winds the stillness broke,
    The crystal icicle is hung.

Where, from their frozen urns, mute springs
    Pour out the river's gradual tide,
Shrilly the skater's iron rings,
    And voices fill the woodland side.

Alas! how changed from the fair scene,
    When birds sang out their mellow lay,
And winds were soft, and woods were green,
    ...

Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
    One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
    Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine.

Stars they are, wherein we read our history,
    As astrologers and seers of eld;
Yet not wrapped about with awful mystery,
    Like the burning stars, which they beheld.

Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
    God hath written in those stars above;
But not less in the bright flowerets under us
    Stands the revelation of his love.

Bright and glorious is that revelation,
    Written all over this great world of ours;
Making evident our own creation,
    In these stars of earth, these golden flowers.

And the Poet, faithful and far-seeing,
    ...

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him. And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence,...

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.