Sleep on! Sleep on! beguiling
    The hours with happy rest.
Sleep! - by that dreamy smiling,
    I know that thou art blest.
Thy mother over thee hath leant
    To guard thee from annoy,
And the angel of the innocent
    Was in that dream, my boy!

The tinting of the summer rose
    Is on that pillowed cheek,
And the quietness of summer thought
    Has made thy forehead meek.
And yet that little ample brow,
    And arching lip, are fraught
With pledges of high manliness,
    And promises of thought.

Thy polished limbs are rounded out
    As is the Autumn fruit,
And full and reedy is the voice
    That slumber hath made mute.
And, looking on thy perfect form -
    Hearing thy pleasant tone -
I almost weep for joy, my so...

'Tis midnight, and solemn darkness broods
    In a lonely, sacred fane -
The church of Our Lady of Montserrat,
    So famous throughout all Spain;
For countless were the pilgrim hosts
    Who knelt at that sacred shrine
With aching hearts, that came to seek
    Relief and grace divine.

Pure as the light of the evening star
    Shines the lamp's pale, solemn ray,
That burns through midnight's hush and gloom,
    As well as the glare of day,
Like the Christian soul, enwrapped in God,
    Resigning each vain delight,
Each earthly lure, to burn and shine
    With pure love in His sight.

Softly the gentle radiance falls
    On a mail-clad warrior there,
Who humbly bows his stately head
    In silent, earnest prayer;
It flashes back f...

Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props
Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits
Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power
Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat:
Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up
And rhythms of change within the heart begun
By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters;
Pylons and monoliths went on by ages,
Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about;
Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid
That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing
Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex;
Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom
Standing on Carthage must get nearer still;
While in Chaldea an altitude of god
Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed
Upon a mountain stirring a surmise
Of floods and alterations of th...

O harass not a driven leaf,
Nor stubble dry in wrath pursue;
A life so brief load not with grief,
Nor with thine arrow pierce me through.

The fragile leaf, by tempest tost,
Is scarcely worth a passing thought;
The brook is crossed, and then is lost;
There let it lie, a thing of naught.

The stubble dry ne'er grows again;
To golden grain it gave its sap.
It died, and then 'twas left by men
To rot betimes, or some mishap.

Am I not like the stubble dry
And fragile leaf by tempest strewed?
Must I not die, then tell me why
A thing so frail is thus pursued?

A voice replies: "Thy life is frail,
Much like the leaf and stubble dry;
Thy strength must fail, and as the gale
Bears them away, so must thou die;

"But live again...

When Freedom, on her natal day,
Within her war-rocked cradle lay,
An iron race around her stood,
Baptized her infant brow in blood;
And, through the storm which round her swept,
Their constant ward and watching kept.
Then, where our quiet herds repose,
The roar of baleful battle rose,
And brethren of a common tongue
To mortal strife as tigers sprung,
And every gift on Freedom's shrine
Was man for beast, and blood for wine!
Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.
So let it be. In God's own might
We gird us for the coming fight,
And, strong in Him whose cause is ours
In con...

The cruel mother of the Loves,
And other Powers offended,
Have stirred my heart, where newly roves
The passion that was ended.

'T is Glycera, to boldness prone,
Whose radiant beauty fires me;
While fairer than the Parian stone
Her dazzling face inspires me.

And on from Cyprus Venus speeds,
Forbidding--ah! the pity--
The Scythian lays, the Parthian meeds,
And such irrelevant ditty.

Here, boys, bring turf and vervain too;
Have bowls of wine adjacent;
And ere our sacrifice is through
She may be more complaisant.

April is in the world again,
And all the world is filled with flowers -
Flowers for others, not for me!
For my one flower I cannot see,
Lost in the April showers.

I cannot wake her, though I sing,
And all the birds, for her dear sake,
Fill with their songs the wintry brake;
Ah! could they make her rise again,
What resurrection would be mine!
Is she too tired to help the sun
And all the little stars to shine?

Non men gran grasia, donna.


Too much good luck no less than misery
        May kill a man condemned to mortal pain,
        If, lost to hope and chilled in every vein,
        A sudden pardon comes to set him free.
Thus thy unwonted kindness shown to me
        Amid the gloom where only sad thoughts reign,
        With too much rapture bringing light again,
        Threatens my life more than that agony.
Good news and bad may bear the self-same knife;
        And death may follow both upon their flight;
        For hearts that shrink or swell, alike will break.
Let then thy beauty, to preserve my life,
        Temper the source of this supreme delight,
        Lest joy so poignant slay a soul so weak.

There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes. John 6:9.


He must have been a thoughtful youth,
His name the record has not given,
But if his heart imbibed the truth,
'Tis written in the books of heaven.
A cipher in the multitude,
He followed with his meager store,
And far from his perception crude
The miracle that made it more.

With loaves and fishes few, this lad
By power and aid of one divine
Has made the hungry thousands glad
And God's providing power to shine.
When at the midweek hour of prayer
Ye faithful mourn your number few,
Pray He who fed that throng be there
Your faith and vigor to renew.

He will your meek petitions hear
Which, like those loaves and fishes small,
Will cause his ...

Come, thou awakener of the spirit's ocean,
Zephyr, whom to thy cloud or cave
No thought can trace! speed with thy gentle motion!

    Though I have found you like a snow-drop pale,
    On sunny days have found you weak and still,
    Though I have often held your girlish head
    Drooped on my shoulder, faint from little ill: -

    Under the blessing of your Psyche-wings
    I hide to-night like one small broken bird,
    So soothed I half-forget the world gone mad: -
    And all the winds of war are now unheard.

    My heaven-doubting pennons feel your hands
    With touch most delicate so circling round,
    That for an hour I dream that God is good.
    And in your shadow, Mercy's ways abound.

    I thought myself the guard of your frail state,
    And yet I come to-night a helpless guest,
    Hiding beneath your giant Psyche-wings,
    Against the pallor of your wondrous...

    Wer't granted me to choose,
How I would end my dayes;
    Since I this life must loose,
It should be in Your praise;
For there is no Bayes
    Can be set aboue you.

    S' impossibly I loue You,
And for you sit so hie,
    Whence none may remoue You
In my cleere Poesie,
That I oft deny
    You so ample Merit.

    The freedome of my Spirit
Maintayning (still) my Cause,
    Your Sex not to inherit,
Vrging the Salique Lawes;
But your Vertue drawes
    From me euery due.

    Thus still You me pursue,
That no where I can dwell,
    By Feare made iust to You,
Who naturally rebell,
Of You that excell
    That should I still Endyte,

    Yet will You want some Ryte.
That lost in your high praise

Happily I had a sight
Of my dearest dear last night;
Make her this day smile on me,
And I'll roses give to thee!

Happily I had a sight
Of my dearest dear last night;
Make her this day smile on me,
And I'll roses give to thee!

Lines written after a summer day's excursion.


Fair Nature's priestesses! to whom,
In hieroglyph of bud and bloom,
Her mysteries are told;
Who, wise in lore of wood and mead,
The seasons' pictured scrolls can read,
In lessons manifold!

Thanks for the courtesy, and gay
Good-humor, which on Washing Day
Our ill-timed visit bore;
Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke
The morning dreams of Artichoke,
Along his wooded shore!

Varied as varying Nature's ways,
Sprites of the river, woodland fays,
Or mountain nymphs, ye seem;
Free-limbed Dianas on the green,
Loch Katrine's Ellen, or Undine,
Upon your favorite stream.

The forms of which the poets told,
The fair benignities of old,
Were doubtless such as yo...

I have no riches but my thoughts,
Yet these are wealth enough for me;
My thoughts of you are golden coins
Stamped in the mint of memory;

And I must spend them all in song,
For thoughts, as well as gold, must be
Left on the hither side of death
To gain their immortality.

A mighty theatre of snow and fire,
Girt with perpetual Winter, and sublime
By reason of that lordly solitude
Which dwells for ever at the world’s white ends;
And in that weird-faced wilderness of ice,
There is no human foot, nor any paw
Or hoof of beast, but where the shrill winds drive
The famished birds of storm across the tracts
Whose centre is the dim mysterious Pole.
Beyond yea far beyond the homes of man,
By water never dark with coming ships,
Near seas that know not feather, scale, or fin,
The grand volcano, like a weird Isaiah,
Set in that utmost region of the Earth,
Doth thunder forth the awful utterance,
Whose syllables are flame; and when the fierce
Antarctic Night doth hold dominionship
Within her fastnessess, then round the cone
Of Erebu...

Evening has thrown her hushing garment round
This little world; no harsh or jarring sound
Disturbs my reverie. The room is dark,
And kneeling at the window I can mark
Each light and shadow of the scene below.
The placid glistening pools, the streams that flow
Through the red earth, left by the hurrying tide;
The ridge of mountain on the farther side
Shewing more black for many twinkling lights
That come and go about the gathering heights.
Below me lie great wharves, dreary and dim,
And lumber houses crowding close and grim
Like giant shadowed guardians of the port,
With towering chimneys outlined tall and swart
Against the silver pools. Two figures pace
The wharf in ghostly silence, face from face.
O'er the black line of mountain, silver-clear
In faint ro...