Silent I'm biding,
    While softly gliding
Sink the still hours to eternity's sleep.
    My fancies roaming
    List in the gloaming: -
Will she the trysting now keep?

    Winter is dreaming,
    Bright stars are beaming,
Smiling their light through its cloud-veil they pour,
    Summer foretelling
    Sweet love compelling; -
Dare she not meet me here more?

    'Neath the ice lying,
    Longing and sighing,
Ocean would wander and warmer lands woo.
    Anchored ships swinging,
    Sail-thoughts outflinging; -
Come we together, we two!

    Whirling and fallings
    Pictures enthralling,
Fairy-light made in the forest the snow;
    Wood-folk are straying,
    Shadows are playing; -
Was it your footstep? Oh...

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies - your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: "I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking 'Anno Domini' to the years?
Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died."

Christmas-eve, 1899.

As they who watch by sick-beds find relief
Unwittingly from the great stress of grief
And anxious care, in fantasies outwrought
From the hearth’s embers flickering low, or caught
From whispering wind, or tread of passing feet,
Or vagrant memory calling up some sweet
Snatch of old song or romance, whence or why
They scarcely know or ask, so, thou and I,
Nursed in the faith that Truth alone is strong
In the endurance which outwearies Wrong,
With meek persistence baffling brutal force,
And trusting God against the universe,
We, doomed to watch a strife we may not share
With other weapons than the patriot’s prayer,
Yet owning, with full hearts and moistened eyes,
The awful beauty of self-sacrifice,
And wrung by keenest sympathy for all
Who give their loved on...

That day we wandered 'mid the hills,—so lone
Clouds are not lonelier,—the forest lay
In emerald darkness 'round us. Many a stone
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way:
And many a bird the glimmering light along
Showered the golden bubbles of its song.
Then in the valley, where the brook went by,
Silvering the ledges that it rippled from,—
An isolated slip of fallen sky,
Epitomizing heaven in its sum,—
An iris bloomed—blue, as if, flower-disguised,
The gaze of Spring had there materialized.
I have forgotten many things since then—
Much beauty and much happiness and grief;
And toiled and dreamed among my fellow-men,
Rejoicing in the knowledge life is brief.
"'T is winter now," so says each barren bough;
And face and hair proclaim 't is winter now....

The fields of youth are filled with flowers,
The wine of youth is strong:
What need have we to count the hours?
The summer days are long.

But soon we find to our dismay
That we are drifting down
The barren slopes that fall away
Towards the foothills grim and grey
That lead to Old Man's Town.

And marching with us on the track
Full many friends we find:
We see them looking sadly back
For those who've dropped behind

But God forfend a fate so dread,
Alone to travel down
The dreary toad we all must tread,
With faltering steps and whitening head,
The road to Old Man's Town!

    I could not run or play
    In boyhood.
    In manhood I could only sip the cup,
    Not drink - For scarlet-fever left my heart diseased.
    Yet I lie here
    Soothed by a secret none but Mary knows:
    There is a garden of acacia,
    Catalpa trees, and arbors sweet with vines -
    There on that afternoon in June
    By Mary's side -
    Kissing her with my soul upon my lips
    It suddenly took flight.

We know where deepest lies the snow,
And where the frost-winds keenest blow,
O'er every mountain's brow,
We long have known and learnt to bear
The wandering outlaw's toil and care,
But where we late were hunted, there
Our foes are hunted now.

We have their princely homes, and they
To our wild haunts are chased away,
Dark woods, and desert caves.
And we can range from hill to hill,
And chase our vanquished victors still;
Small respite will they find until
They slumber in their graves.

But I would rather be the hare,
That crouching in its sheltered lair
Must start at every sound;
That forced from cornfields waving wide
Is driven to seek the bare hillside,
Or in the tangled copse to hide,
Than be the hunter's hound.

Ere yet our course was graced with social trees
It lacked not old remains of hawthorn bowers,
Where small birds warbled to their paramours;
And, earlier still, was heard the hum of bees;
I saw them ply their harmless robberies,
And caught the fragrance which the sundry flowers,
Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers,
Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze.
There bloomed the strawberry of the wilderness;
The trembling eyebright showed her sapphire blue,
The thyme her purple, like the blush of Even;
And if the breath of some to no caress
Invited, forth they peeped so fair to view,
All kinds alike seemed favourites of Heaven.

    Grey clouds on the tinted sky,
    A drifting moon, a quiet breeze
    Drooping mournfully to cry
    In the branches of the trees.

    The crying wind, the sighing trees,
    The ruffled stars, the darkness falling
    Down the sky, and on the breeze
    A belated linnet calling.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
--Goldsmith.


I fear the palace of the rich,
    I fear the hovel of the poor;
Though fortified by moat and ditch,
    The castle strong could not endure;
Nor can the squalid hovel be
    A source of strength, and those who cause
This widening discrepancy
    Infringe on God's eternal laws.

The heritage of man, the earth,
    Was framed for homes, not vast estates;
A lowering scale of human worth
    Each generation demonstrates,
Which feels the landlord's iron hand,
    And hopeless, plod with effort brave;
Who love no home can love no land;
    These own no home, until the grave.

The nation's strongest safeguards lie
In free...

[From Farmer Harrington's Calendar.]

NOVEMBER 20, 18 - .

        It's quite a show, and strikes me a good deal -
        How many ride around here on a wheel;
        The streets are graded very smooth and nice,
        And make this town the wheelman's paradise.
        A brother-farmer - neighbor, once, to me -
        Who's down here, like myself, to hear and see,
        Told me, last night, before we "doused the glim,"
        How a young wheel-chap got the start of him.
        'Twould skip my memory, maybe, if I'd let it;
        I'll put it down here so I sha'n't forget it.



[Farmer And Wheel; Or, The New Lochinvar.]

I.

    I was hoein' in my corn-field, on a spring day, just at noon,
    An' a hearkin' in my ...

INGOLDSBY.



Year by year do Beauty's daughters,
In the sweetest gloves and shawls,
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.

'Nulla non donanda lauru'
Is that city: you could not,
Placing England's map before you,
Light on a more favoured spot.

If no clear translucent river
Winds 'neath willow-shaded paths,
"Children and adults" may shiver
All day in "Chalybeate baths:"

If "the inimitable Fechter"
Never brings the gallery down,
Constantly "the Great Protector"
There "rejects the British crown:"

And on every side the painter
Looks on wooded vale and plain
And on fair hills, faint and fainter
Outlined as they near the main.

There I met with him, my chosen
Fri...

I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.

For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.

And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.

Misery is my lot,
Poverty and pain;
Ill was I begot,
Ill must I remain;
Yet the wretched days
One sweet comfort bring,
When God whispering says,
"Sing, O singer, sing!"

Chariots rumble by,
Splashing me with mud;
Insolence see I
Fawn to royal blood;
Solace have I then
From each galling sting
In that voice again,--
"Sing, O singer, sing!"

Cowardly at heart,
I am forced to play
A degraded part
For its paltry pay;
Freedom is a prize
For no starving thing;
Yet that small voice cries,
"Sing, O singer, sing!"

I was young, but now,
When I'm old and gray,
Love--I know not how
Or why--hath sped away;
Still, in winter days
As in hours of spring,
Still a whisper says,

The tears of fallen women turned to ice
By man's cold pity for repentant vice.

There was a man who watched the river flow
Past the huge town, one gray November day.
Round him in narrow high-piled streets at play
The boys made merry as they saw him go,
Murmuring half-loud, with eyes upon the stream,
The immortal screed he held within his hand.
For he was walking in an April land
With Faust and Helen.    Shadowy as a dream
Was the prose-world, the river and the town.
Wild joy possessed him; through enchanted skies
He saw the cranes of Ibycus swoop down.
He closed the page, he lifted up his eyes,
Lo - a black line of birds in wavering thread
Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!

I.

Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea–
And Willy’s voice in the wind, ‘O mother, come out to me.’
Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot go?
For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at the snow.

II.

We should be seen, my dear; they would spy us out of the town.
The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the down,
When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of the chain,
And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched with the rain.

III.

Anything fallen again? nay–what was there left to fall?
I have taken them home, I have number’d the bones, I have hidden them all.
What am I saying? and what are you? do you come as a spy?
Falls? what falls? who ...

The curious wits, seeing dull pensiuenesse
Bewray it self in my long-settl'd eies
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise,
With idle paines and missing ayme do guesse.
Some, that know how my spring I did addresse,
Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies;
Others, because the prince my seruice tries,
Thinke that I think State errours to redress:
But harder iudges iudge ambitions rage:
Scourge of itselfe, still climbing slipperie place:
Holds my young brain captiu'd in golden cage.
O fooles, or ouer-wise. alas, the race
Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start
But only Stellaes eyes and Stellaes heart.