'Twas a fit hour for parting,
    For athwart the leaden sky
The heavy clouds came gathering
    And sailing gloomily:
The earth was drunk with heaven's tears,
    And each moaning autumn breeze
Shook the burthen of its weeping
    Off the overladen trees.
The waterfall rushed swollen down,
    In the gloaming, still and gray;
With a foam-wreath on the angry brow
    Of each wave that flashed away.
My tears were mingling with the rain,
    That fell so cold and fast,
And my spirit felt thy low deep sigh
    Through the wild and roaring blast.
The beauty of the summer woods
    Lay rustling round our feet,
And all fair things had passed away -
    'Twas an hour for parting meet.

There's a place in the North where the bonnie broom grows,
Where winding through green meadows the silver Maine flows,
Every lark as it soars and sings that sweet spot knows;
                For the mate for whom it sings,
                Till the clear blue heaven rings,
Is brooding on its nest mid the daisies in the grass;
                And that psalmist sweet, the thrush,
                And the linnet in the bush,
Tell the children all their secrets in song as they pass.

Oh brightly shines the sun there where wee birdies sing,
A glamour's o'er the buds in the green lap of spring,
In happy, happy laughter children's voices ring!
                Like some fair enchanted ground,
                In memory it is found,
Where my childhood's golden hours of happine...

Ah! did you ever hear the Spring
    Calling you through the snow,
Or hear the little blackbird sing
    Inside its egg - or go
To that green land where grass begins,
    Each tiny seed, to grow?

O have you heard what none has heard,
    Or seen what none has seen;
O have you been to that strange land
    Where no one else has been!

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank w...

The day's sharp strife is ended now,
Our work is done, God knoweth how!
As on the thronged, unrestful town
The patience of the moon looks down,
I wait to hear, beside the wire,
The voices of its tongues of fire.
Slow, doubtful, faint,they seem at first:
Be strong, my heart, to know the worst!
Hark! there the Alleghanies spoke;
That sound from lake and prairie broke,
That sunset-gun of triumph rent
The silence of a continent!
That signal from Nebraska sprung,
This, from Nevada's mountain tongue!
Is that thy answer, strong and free,
O loyal heart of Tennessee?
What strange, glad voice is that which calls
From Wagner's grave and Sumter's walls?
From Mississippi's fountain-head
A sound as of the hisoh's tread!
There rustled freedom's Charter Oa...

The rafters are open to sun, moon, and star,
Thistles and nettles grow high in the bar,
The chimneys are crumbling, the log fires are dead,
And green mosses spring from the hearthstone instead.
The voices are silent, the bustle and din,
For the railroad hath ruined the Cherry-tree Inn.

Save the glimmer of stars, or the moon's pallid streams,
And the sounds of the 'possums that camp on the beams,
The bar-room is dark and the stable is still,
For the coach comes no more over Cherry-tree Hill.
No riders push on through the darkness to win
The rest and the comfort of Cherry-tree Inn.

I drift from my theme, for my memory strays
To the carrying, digging, and bushranging days,
Far back to the seasons that I love the best,
When a stream of wild diggers rushed i...

He saw the portrait of his enemy, offered
At auction in a street he journeyed nigh,
That enemy, now late dead, who in his life-time
Had injured deeply him the passer-by.
"To get that picture, pleased be God, I'll try,
And utterly destroy it; and no more
Shall be inflicted on man's mortal eye
A countenance so sinister and sore!"

And so he bought the painting. Driving homeward,
"The frame will come in useful," he declared,
"The rest is fuel." On his arrival, weary,
Asked what he bore with him, and how he fared,
He said he had bid for a picture, though he cared
For the frame only: on the morrow he
Would burn the canvas, which could well be spared,
Seeing that it portrayed his enemy.

Next day some other duty found him busy;
The foe was laid his fa...

Let dainty wits crie on the Sisters nine,
That, brauely maskt, their fancies may be told;
Or, Pindars apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,
Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold;
Or else let them in statlier glorie shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problemes old;
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbes or beasts which Inde or Affrick hold.
For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know,
Phrases and problems from my reach do grow;
And strange things cost too deare for my poor sprites.
How then? euen thus: in Stellaes face I reed
What Loue and Beautie be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

Ah, God! were I away, away,
By woodland-belted hills!
There might be more in Thy bright day
Than my poor spirit thrills.

The elder coppice, banks of blooms,
The spice-wood brush, the field
Of tumbled clover, and perfumes
Hot, weedy pastures yield.

The old rail-fence whose angles hold
Bright briar and sassafras,
Sweet priceless wild flowers blue and gold
Starred through the moss and grass.

The ragged path that winds unto
Lone cow-behaunted nooks,
Through brambles to the shade and dew
Of rocks and woody brooks.

To see the minnows turn and gleam
White sparkling bellies, all
Shoot in gray schools adown the stream
Let but a dead leaf fall.

The buoyant pleasure and delight
Of floating feathered seeds.
Capri...

        "And those things do best please me,
        That befall preposterously."
        PUCK Junior, Midsummer Night's Dream.


Who wants old Puck? for here am I,
A mongrel imp, 'twixt earth and sky,
Ready alike to crawl or fly;
Now in the mud, now in the air,
And, so 'tis for mischief, reckless where.

As to my knowledge, there's no end to't,
For, where I haven't it, I pretend to't:
And, 'stead of taking a learned degree
At some dull university,
Puck found it handier to commence
With a certain share of impudence,
Which passes one off as learned and clever,
Beyond all other degrees whatever;
And enables a man of lively sconce
To be Master of all the Arts at once.
No matter what the science may be--
Ethics, Physics,...

Here is your parents' dwelling with its curtained windows telling
Of no thought of us within it or of our arrival here;
Their slumbers have been normal after one day more of formal
Matrimonial commonplace and household life's mechanic gear.

I would be candid willingly, but dawn draws on so chillingly
As to render further cheerlessness intolerable now,
So I will not stand endeavouring to declare a day for severing,
But will clasp you just as always - just the olden love avow.

Through serene and surly weather we have walked the ways together,
And this long night's dance this year's end eve now finishes the spell;
Yet we dreamt us but beginning a sweet sempiternal spinning
Of a cord we have spun to breaking - too intemperately, too well.

Yes; last night we danced I...

Air - "The blue-eyed lass."


I.

    I gaed a waefu' gate yestreen,
        A gate, I fear, I'll dearlie rue;
    I gat my death frae twa sweet een,
        Twa lovely een o' bonnie blue.
    'Twas not her golden ringlets bright;
        Her lips, like roses, wat wi' dew,
    Her heaving bosom, lily-white,
        It was her een sae bonnie blue.

II.

    She talk'd, she smil'd, my heart she wyl'd;
        She charm'd my soul, I wist na how:
    And ay the stound, the deadly wound,
        Cam frae her een sae bonnie blue.
    But spare to speak, and spare to speed;
        She'll aiblins listen to my vow:
    Should she refuse, I'll lay my dead
        To her twa een sae bonnie blue.

O thou who giving helm and sword,
Gav'st, too, the rusting rain,
And starry dark's all tender dews
To blunt and stain:

Out of the battle I am sped,
Unharmed, yet stricken sore;
A living shape amid whispering shades
On Lethe's shore.

No trophy in my hands I bring,
To this sad, sighing stream,
The neighings and the trumps and cries
Were but a dream.

Traitor to life, of life betrayed:
O, of thy mercy deep,
A dream my all, the all I ask
Is sleep.

To live within a cave, it is most good;
But, if God make a day,
And some one come, and say,
'Lo! I have gather'd faggots in the wood!'
E'en let him stay,
And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood!

So sit till morning! when the light is grown
That he the path can read,
Then bid the man God-speed!
His morning is not thine: yet must thou own
They have a cheerful warmth, those ashes on the stone.

"A noteless stream, the Birchbrook runs
Beneath its leaning trees;
That low, soft ripple is its own,
That dull roar is the sea's.

Of human signs it sees alone
The distant church spire's tip,
And, ghost-like, on a blank of gray,
The white sail of a ship.

No more a toiler at the wheel,
It wanders at its will;
Nor dam nor pond is left to tell
Where once was Birchbrook mill.

The timbers of that mill have fed
Long since a farmer's fires;
His doorsteps are the stones that ground
The harvest of his sires.

Man trespassed here; but Nature lost
No right of her domain;
She waited, and she brought the old
Wild beauty back again.

By day the sunlight through the leaves
Falls on its moist, green sod,
And wakes the v...

I find an old deserted nest,
    Half-hidden in the underbrush:
A withered leaf, in phantom jest,
    Has nestled in it like a thrush
With weary, palpitating breast.

I muse as one in sad surprise
    Who seeks his childhood's home once more,
And finds it in a strange disguise
    Of vacant rooms and naked floor,
With sudden tear-drops in his eyes.

An empty nest!    It used to bear
    A happy burden, when the breeze
Of summer rocked it, and a pair
    Of merry tattlers told the trees
What treasures they had hidden there.

But Fancy, flitting through the gleams
    Of youth's sunshiny atmosphere,
Has fallen in the past, and seems,
    Like this poor leaflet nestled here, -
A phantom guest of empty dreams.

Loitering with a vacant eye
Along the Grecian gallery,
And brooding on my heavy ill,
I met a statue standing still.
Still in marble stone stood he,
And stedfastly he looked at me.
"Well met," I thought the look would say,
"We both were fashioned far away;
We neither knew, when we were young,
These Londoners we live among."

Still he stood and eyed me hard,
An earnest and a grave regard:
"What, lad, drooping with your lot?
I too would be where I am not.
I too survey that endless line
Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.
Years, ere you stood up from rest,
On my neck the collar prest;
Years, when you lay down your ill,
I shall stand and bear it still.
Courage, lad, 'tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong."
So ...

Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running,
Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,
Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
That savage trinity wa...