[1]

To Madame Harvey.[2]

Sound reason and a tender heart
With thee are friends that never part.
A hundred traits might swell the roll; -
Suffice to name thy nobleness of soul;
Thy power to guide both men and things;
Thy temper open, bland and free,
A gift that draweth friends to thee,
To which thy firm affection clings,
Unmarr'd by age or change of clime,
Or tempests of this stormy time; -
All which deserve, in highest lyric,
A rich and lofty panegyric;
But no such thing wouldst thou desire,
Whom pomp displeases, praises tire.
Hence mine is simple, short, and plain;
Yet, madam, I would fain
Tack on a word or two
Of homage to your country due, -
A country well beloved by you.

With mind to match th...

White from her chrysalis of cloud,
The moth-like moon swings upward through the night;
And all the bee-like stars that crowd
The hollow hive of heav'n wane in her light.

Along the distance, folds of mist
Hang frost-pale, ridging all the dark with gray;
Tinting the trees with amethyst,
Touching with pearl and purple every spray.

All night the stealthy frost and fog
Conspire to slay the rich-robed weeds and flowers;
To strip of wealth the woods, and clog
With piled-up gold of leaves the creek that cowers.

I seem to see their Spirits stand,
Molded of moonlight, faint of form and face,
Now reaching high a chilly hand
To pluck some walnut from its spicy place:

Now with fine fingers, phantom-cold,
Splitting the wahoo's pods of rose, and ...

Doom’d, as I am, in solitude to waste
The present moments, and regret the past;
Deprived of every joy I valued most,
My friend torn from me, and my mistress lost;
Call not this gloom I wear, this anxious mien,
The dull effect of humour, or of spleen!
Still, still I mourn, with each returning day,
Him[1] snatch’d by fate in early youth away;
And her—thro’ tedious years of doubt and pain,
Fix’d in her choice, and faithful—but in vain!
O prone to pity, generous, and sincere,
Whose eye ne’er yet refused the wretch a tear;
Whose heart the real claim of friendship knows;
Nor thinks a lover’s are but fancied woes;
See me—ere yet my destined course half done,
Cast forth a wand’rer on a world unknown!
See me neglected on the world’s rude coast,
Each dea...

The moon, a circle of gold,
O'er the crowded housetops rolled,
And peeped in an attic, where,
'Mid sordid things and bare,
A sick child lay and gazed
At a road to the far-away,
A road he followed, mazed,
That grew from a moonbeam-ray,
A road of light that led
From the foot of his garret-bed
Out of that room of hate,
Where Poverty slept by his mate,
Sickness out of the street,
Into a wonderland,
Where a voice called, far and sweet,
"Come, follow our Fairy band!"
A purple shadow, sprinkled
With golden star-dust, twinkled
Suddenly into the room
Out of the winter gloom:
And it wore a face to him
Of a dream he'd dreamed: a form
Of Joy, whose face was dim,
Yet bright with a magic charm.
And the shadow seemed to trail,
Sou...

In the dewy depths of the graveyard
    I lie in the tangled grass,
And watch, in the sea of azure,
    The white cloud-islands pass.

The birds in the rustling branches
    Sing gaily overhead;
Grey stones like sentinel spectres
    Are guarding the silent dead.

The early flowers sleep shaded
    In the cool green noonday glooms;
The broken light falls shuddering
    On the cold white face of the tombs.

Without, the world is smiling
    In the infinite love of God,
But the sunlight fails and falters
    When it falls on the churchyard sod.

On me the joyous rapture
    Of a heart's first love is shed,
But it falls on my heart as coldly
    As sunlight on the dead.

Many things perplex me and leave me troubled,
Many things are locked away in the white book of stars
Never to be opened by me.
The starr’d leaves are silently turned,
And the mooned leaves;
And as they are turned, fall the shadows of life and death.
Perplexed and troubled,
I light a small light in a small room,
The lighted walls come closer to me,
The familiar pictures are clear.
I sit in my favourite chair and turn in my mind
The tiny pages of my own life, whereon so little is written,
And hear at the eastern window the pressure of a long wind, coming
From I know not where.
How many times have I sat here,
How many times will I sit here again,
Thinking these same things over and over in solitude
As a child says over and over
The first word he has lea...

    My life's blossom might have bloomed on all sides
    Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
    On the side of me which you in the village could see.
    From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
    My flowering side you never saw!
    Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
    Who do not know the ways of the wind
    And the unseen forces
    That govern the processes of life.

How shall I paint thee? Be this naked stone
My seat, while I give way to such intent;
Pleased could my verse, a speaking monument,
Make to the eyes of men thy features known.
But as of all those tripping lambs not one
Outruns his fellows, so hath Nature lent
To thy beginning nought that doth present
Peculiar ground for hope to build upon.
To dignify the spot that gives thee birth,
No sign of hoar Antiquity's esteem
Appears, and none of modern Fortune's care;
Yet thou thyself hast round thee shed a gleam
Of brilliant moss, instinct with freshness rare;
Prompt offering to thy Foster-mother, Earth!

Beaten back in sad dejection,
After years of weary toil
On that burning hot selection
Where the drought has gorged his spoil.

All in vain ’gainst him, the vulture,
I have battled without rest,
In the van of agriculture,
Marching out into the West.

Now the eagle-hawks are feeding
On my perished stock that reek
Where the water-holes receding
Long had left the burning creek.

I must labour without pity,
I the pick and spade must wield
In the streetways of the city
Or upon another’s field!

Can it be my reason’s rocking,
For I feel a burning hate
For the God who, only mocking,
Sent the prayed-for rain too late?

Pour, ye mocking rains, and rattle
On the bare, brown, grassless plain,
On the shrivelled hides o...

Aura, che quelle chiome bionde e crespe.

HE ENVIES THE BREEZE WHICH SPORTS WITH HER, THE STREAM THAT FLOWS TOWARDS HER.


    Ye laughing gales, that sporting with my fair,
The silky tangles of her locks unbraid;
And down her breast their golden treasures spread;
Then in fresh mazes weave her curling hair,
You kiss those bright destructive eyes, that bear
The flaming darts by which my heart has bled;
My trembling heart! that oft has fondly stray'd
To seek the nymph, whose eyes such terrors wear.
Methinks she's found--but oh! 'tis fancy's cheat!
Methinks she's seen--but oh! 'tis love's deceit!
Methinks she's near--but truth cries "'tis not so!"
Go happy gale, and with my Laura dwell!
Go happy stream, and to my Laura tell
What envied joys in th...

You think the ridge hills flowing, breaking
with ups and downs will, though,
building constancy into the black foreground

for each sunset, hold on to you, if dreams
wander, give reality recurrence enough to keep
an image clear, but then you realize, time

going on, that time's residual like the last
ice age's cool still in the rocks, averaged
maybe with the cool of the age before, that

not only are you not being held onto but where
else could time do so well without you,
what is your time where so much time is saved?

THE POET SINGS TO HIS POET

From dawn to dusk, and from dusk to dawn,
    We two are sundered always, sweet.
A few stars shake o'er the rocky lawn
    And the cold sea-shore when we meet.
    The twilight comes with thy shadowy feet.

We are not day and night, my Fair,
    But one. It is an hour of hours.
And thoughts that are not otherwhere
    Are thought here 'mid the blown sea-flowers,
    This meeting and this dusk of ours.

Delight has taken Pain to her heart,
    And there is dusk and stars for these.
Oh, linger, linger! They would not part;
    And the wild wind comes from over-seas
    With a new song to the olive trees.

And when we meet by the sounding pine
    Sleep draws near to his dreamless brother.
And when thy swe...

    When the storm was proudest,
    And the wind was loudest,
I heard the hollow caverns drinking down below;
    When the stars were bright,
    And the ground was white,
I heard the grasses springing underneath the snow.

    Many voices spake--
    The river to the lake,
And the iron-ribbed sky was talking to the sea;
    And every starry spark
    Made music with the dark,
And said how bright and beautiful everything must be.

    When the sun was setting,
    All the clouds were getting
Beautiful and silvery in the rising moon;
    Beneath the leafless trees
    Wrangling in the breeze,
I could hardly see them for the leaves of June.

    When the day had ended,
    And the night descended,
I heard the sound of streams ...

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle;
Fire and sleete and candle lighte,
And Christe receive thye saule.

When thou from hence away are paste,
Every nighte and alle;
To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste;
And Christe receive thye saule.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Every nighte and alle;
Sit thee down, and put them on;
And Christe receive thye saule.

If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gavest nane,
Every nighte and alle;
The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thye saule.

From Whinny-muir when thou mayst passe,
Every nighte and alle;
To Brigg o' Dread thou comest at laste,
And Christe receive thye saul

(A stanza wanting)

From Brigg o' Dread when thou...

    They have chiseled on my stone the words:
    "His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
    That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
    This was a man."
    Those who knew me smile
    As they read this empty rhetoric.
    My epitaph should have been:
    "Life was not gentle to him,
    And the elements so mixed in him
    That he made warfare on life
    In the which he was slain."
    While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
    Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
    Graven by a fool!

Now as even's warning bell
Rings the day's departing knell,
Leaving me from labour free,
Solitude, I'll walk with thee:
Whether 'side the woods we rove,
Or sweep beneath the willow grove;
Whether sauntering we proceed
Cross the green, or down the mead;
Whether, sitting down, we look
On the bubbles of the brook;
Whether, curious, waste an hour,
Pausing o'er each tasty flower;
Or, expounding nature's spells,
From the sand pick out the shells;
Or, while lingering by the streams,
Where more sweet the music seems,
Listen to the soft'ning swells
Of some distant chiming bells
Mellowing sweetly on the breeze,
Rising, falling by degrees,
Dying now, then wak'd again
In full many a 'witching strain,
Sounding, as the gale flits by,
Flats...

From Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome,
From Mad to Saco river,
For patriarchs of the primal wood
We sought with vain endeavor.

And then we said: “The giants old
Are lost beyond retrieval;
This pygmy growth the axe has spared
Is not the wood primeval.

“Look where we will o’er vale and hill,
How idle are our searches
For broad-girthed maples, wide-limbed oaks,
Centennial pines and birches.

“Their tortured limbs the axe and saw
Have changed to beams and trestles;
They rest in walls, they float on seas,
They rot in sunken vessels.

“This shorn and wasted mountain land
Of underbrush and boulder,
Who thinks to see its full-grown tree
Must live a century older.”

At last to us a woodland path,
To open sunset leading,

I once was fond of fools,

And bid them come each day;
Then each one brought his tools

The carpenter to play;
The roof to strip first choosing,

Another to supply,
The wood as trestles using,

To move it by-and-by,
While here and there they ran,

And knock'd against each other;
To fret I soon began,

My anger could not smother,
So cried, "Get out, ye fools!"

At this they were offended
Then each one took his tools,

And so our friendship ended.

Since that, I've wiser been,

And sit beside my door;
When one of them is seen,

I cry, "Appear no more!"
"Hence, stupid knave!" I bellow:

At this he's angry too:
"You impudent old fellow!

And pray, sir, who are you?<...