Lament who will, in fruitless tears,
The speed with which our moments fly;
I sigh not over vanished years,
But watch the years that hasten by.

Look, how they come, a mingled crowd
Of bright and dark, but rapid days;
Beneath them, like a summer cloud,
The wide world changes as I gaze.

What! grieve that time has brought so soon
The sober age of manhood on!
As idly might I weep, at noon,
To see the blush of morning gone.

Could I give up the hopes that glow
In prospect like Elysian isles;
And let the cheerful future go,
With all her promises and smiles?

The future! cruel were the power
Whose doom would tear thee from my heart.
Thou sweetener of the present hour!
We cannot, no, we will not part.

Oh, leave me, still,...

I.

Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers
Breathed on the eyelids of Love by music that slumbers,
Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow,
Thou comest mysterious,
In beauty imperious,
Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know:
Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken,
Helplessly shaken and tossed,
And of they tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken,
My lips, unsatisfied, thirst;
Mine eyes are accurst
With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken;
And mine ears, in listening lost,
Yearn, waiting the note of a chord that will never awaken.

II.

Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,
Resonant bar upon bar,
The vibrating lyre
Of the spirit responds with melodious fire...

On your brow, the steppes of Asia
are fetched by deep set eyes
A colouring distict with mystery
perceives the Polos greeting the Great Khan,
the golden isle of Ciphangu, the sultry east.

I revel in the mystery
of my warm, wet flower.
A pollen bee laden with honey
squirms, embraces with me,
in the abrupt opening of our jar,
serrated edge of the known world.

The air, buoyed and elastic with pleasure, belongs to me.
Tawny, pale rose, your oriental skin
peels back
the tiny veils separating our cultures.
I peer in to find Confucian
lilac, towers of silence,
opal pheasants.

Harmony strains all dogmas.
Rain darts penetrate the gathering pools.
The tiny plastic cup
my life,
inseparable from your hand.

Dear little Slavic Sappho, we had thought,
Hearing thy songs so sweetly, deftly wrought,
That thou shouldst have an heritage one day
Beyond thy father's lands: his lute to play.
For not an hour of daylight's joyous round
But thou didst fill it full of lovely sound,
Just as the nightingale doth scatter pleasure
Upon the dark, in glad unstinted measure.
Then Death came stalking near thee, timid thing,
And thou in sudden terror tookest wing.
Ah, that delight, it was not overlong
And I pay dear with sorrow for brief song.
Thou still wert singing when thou cam'st to die;
Kissing thy mother, thus thou saidst good-bye:
        "My mother, I shall serve thee now no more
Nor sit about thy table's charming store;
I must lay down my keys to go from here,
To leave th...

Hail, mildly pleasing Solitude,
Companion of the wise and good,
But from whose holy piercing eye
The herd of fools and villains fly.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whispered talk,
Which innocence and truth imparts,
And melts the most obdurate hearts.
A thousand shapes you wear with ease,
And still in every shape you please.
Now wrapt in some mysterious dream,
A lone philosopher you seem;
Now quick from hill to vale you fly,
And now you sweep the vaulted sky;
A shepherd next, you haunt the plain,
And warble forth your oaten strain;
A lover now, with all the grace
Of that sweet passion in your face;
Then, calmed to friendship, you assume
The gentle looking Hertford's bloom,
As, with her Musidora, she
(Her Musidora fo...

Give me one kiss,
And no more:
If so be, this
Makes you poor
To enrich you,
I'll restore
For that one, two-
Thousand score.

Frost-locked all the winter,
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
What shall make their sap ascend
That they may put forth shoots?
Tips of tender green,
Leaf, or blade, or sheath;
Telling of the hidden life
That breaks forth underneath,
Life nursed in its grave by Death.

Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly,
Drips the soaking rain,
By fits looks down the waking sun:
Young grass springs on the plain;
Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees;
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
Swollen with sap put forth their shoots;
Curled-headed ferns sprout in the lane;
Birds sing and pair again.

There is no time like Spring,
When life's alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
A...

Oft of the hiding Oread wast thou seen
At earliest morn, a tall imperial shape,
High-buskined, dew-dripped, and on close, chaste curls,
Long blackness of thick hair, the tipsy drops
Caught from the dipping sprays of under bosks,
Kissed of thy cheek and of thy shoulder brushed,
Thy rosy cheek as haughty Hera's fair,
Thy snow-soft shoulder luminous as light.

Oft did the shaggy hills and solitudes
Of Arethusa shout and ring and reel,
Reverberate and echo merrily
With the mad chiding of thy merry hounds,
Big mouthed and musical, that on the stag,
Or bristling wild-boar furious grew in quest,
And thou, as keen, fleet-footed and clean-limbed,
Thou, thou, O goddess, with thy quivered crew,
Most loveliest maids and fit to wed with gods,
Rushed, swinging on ...

Dust on the page, from these forgetful years!
I brush it off, to see the fading date
Written in boyish hand; to find through tears
The lad's dear name, inscribed with all the state
Of the first day's possession; and to read
Along the tell-tale margin, scribbled thick.
Here is the note, 'twas writ with guilty speed
And here the sketch, with guilty pencil quick;
And here's a picture! Was she ever so?
Were these her curls and this her merry look
Who lieth in her old green grave as low
As he is lying? Ah, this faded book!
I think not of the bold and storied wrong
Done for a woman's fairness, nor of strong
And god-like heroes, nor of beauteous youth
In game and battle, but, with heart of ruth,
About this boy, who laughed and played and read
So carelessly! Ah, ...

One Morn as through Hyde Park we walk’d.
My friend and I, by chance we talk’d
Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön;
And after we awhile had gone
In Lessing’s track, and tried to see
What painting is, what poetry,
Diverging to another thought,
‘Ah,’ cries my friend, ‘but who hath taught
Why music and the other arts
Oftener perform aright their parts
Than poetry? why she, than they,
Fewer real successes can display?

‘For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece
Where best the poet framed his piece,
Even in that Phoebus-guarded ground
Pausanias on his travels found
Good poems, if he look’d, more rare
(Though many) than good statues were,
For these, in truth, were everywhere!
Of bards full many a stroke divine
In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line,
The ...

I heard the strokes of the midnight bell
As they thrilled the quiet air,
And saw the soft, white curtains wave
In the lamp's uncertain glare;
And felt the breath of the July night,
Laden with fragrance and warmth and blight.

I knew that scarcely an hour before,
With plaintive and feeble wail,
A spirit had entered the gates of time,
A being helpless and frail;
That cradled beside me the stranger lay,
Though I had not dared o'er her face to pray.

But roused by the voice of the midnight chime,
O'er the little one I bent,
And soft, sweet eyes were upraised to mine,
As blue as the firmament, -
Eyes that had never beheld the day,
Or the chastened light of the moonbeam's ray.

O wonderful meeting, on the verge
Of Life and the dark BEYO...

Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, --
Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon, --
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky

With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.

(Time Night. Scene the woods.)


Where shall I turn me? whither shall I bend
My weary way? thus worn with toil and faint
How thro' the thorny mazes of this wood
Attain my distant dwelling? that deep cry
That rings along the forest seems to sound
My parting knell: it is the midnight howl
Of hungry monsters prowling for their prey!
Again! oh save me--save me gracious Heaven!
I am not fit to die!
                Thou coward wretch
Why heaves thy trembling heart? why shake thy limbs
Beneath their palsied burden? is there ought
So lovely in existence? would'st thou drain
Even to its dregs the bitter draught of life?
Dash down the loathly bowl! poor outcast slave
Stamp'd with the brand of Vice and Infamy
Why should the villain Frederic shrink from Dea...

    A poet of my native land has said -
    The life the good and virtuous lead on earth
    Is like the black-eyed maiden of the East,
    Who paints the lids to look more bright and fair.
    The eyes may smart and water, but withal
    She loves to please them that behold her face.
    E'en so, my Master, thine own life has been.
    Thy songs have pleased the world, thy thoughts divine
    Have purified, likewise ennobled man.
    And what are they, those songs and thoughts divine,
    But sad experience of thy life, dipt deep
    In thine own tears, and traced on nature's page?
    To please and teach the world for two dear ones
    You mourned - a friend in youth, a son in age
    'Tis said the life that gives one moment's joy
    To one lone mortal is not li...

Silly Susan Scuppernong
Cried so hard and cried so long,
People asked her what was wrong.

She replied, "I do not know
Any reason for my woe -
I just feel like feeling so."

'Tis not when we look on the dreamless dead,
And feel that the spirit forever has fled;
'Tis not when we're called to the voiceless tomb
By the loved who were culled in their brightest bloom;
'Tis not when the grave's last rite is o'er,
And we know they are gone to return no more;
But, oh! 'tis when Time with oblivious wing
A balm to all other hearts may bring;
When the dark, dark hours of grief are o'er,
And we join the world we can love no more,
That world whose grief for the absent one
Passed like a cloud from an April sun;
When, amid the mirth that salutes the ear,
One tone is gone we had used to hear,
One form is missed in that happy train,
That will never exult in its sports again;
We feel that death has indeed passed o'er,
And a blank...

[W.M.]


Most-like it was this kingly lad
Spake out of the pure joy he had
In his child-heart of the wee maid
Whose eerie beauty sudden laid
A spell upon him, and his words
Burst as a song of any bird's: -

A peerless Princess thou shalt be,
Through wit of love's rare sorcery:
To crown the crown of thy gold hair
Thou shalt have rubies, bleeding there
Their crimson splendor midst the marred
Pulp of great pearls, and afterward


Leaking in fainter ruddy stains
Adown thy neck-and-armlet-chains
Of turquoise, chrysoprase, and mad
Light-frenzied diamonds, dartling glad
Swift spirts of shine that interfuse
As though with lucent crystal dews
That glance and glitter like split rays
Of sunshine, born of burgeoning Mays
W...

Let the wild red-rose bloom.    Though not to thee
    So delicately perfect as the white
    And unwed lily drooping in the light,
Though she has known the kisses of the bee
    And tells her amorous tale to passers-by
In perfumed whispers and with untaught grace,
Still let the red-rose bloom in her own place;
    She could not be the lily should she try.

Why to the wondrous nightingale cry hush
    Or bid her cease her wild heart-breaking lay,
    And tune her voice to imitate the way
The whip-poor-will makes music, or the thrush?
    All airs of sorrow to one theme belong,
And passion is not copyrighted yet.
Each heart writes its own music.    Why not let
    The nightingale unchided sing her song?