We have a little garden,
        A garden of our own,
And every day we water there
        The seeds that we have sown.

We love our little garden,
        And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
        Or blighted blossom there.

Today, through your Easter market
In the lazy Southern sun,
I strolled with hands in pockets
Past the flower-stalls one by one.

Indolent, dreamy, ready
For anything to amuse,
Shyfoot out for a ramble
In his oldest hat and shoes.

Roses creamy and yellow,
Azaleas crimson and white,
And the flaky fresh carnations
My Orient of delight,--

Masses and banks of blossom
That dazzle and summon the eye,
Till the buyers are half bewildered
To know what they want. Not I.

Who would not rather be artist
And slip through the crowd unseen
To gather it all in a picture
And guess what the faces mean?

So down through the chaffering darkies
I pass to the sidewalk's end,
Through the smiling gingham bonnets
With their ...

Steadfast as sorrow, fiery sad, and sweet
With underthoughts of love and faith, more strong
Than doubt and hate and all ill thoughts which throng,
Haply, round hope's or fear's world-wandering feet
That find no rest from wandering till they meet
Death, bearing palms in hand and crowns of song;
His face, who thought to vanquish wrong with wrong,
Erring, and make rage and redemption meet,
Havoc and freedom; weaving in one weft
Good with his right hand, evil with his left;
But all a hero lived and erred and died;
Looked thus upon the living world he left
So bravely that with pity less than pride
Men hail him Patriot and Tyrannicide.

The mothers wish for no more daughters;
There is no future before them.
They bow their heads and their pride
At the end of the many tribes' journey.

The mothers weep over their children,
Loved and unwelcome together,
Who should have been dreamed, not born,
Since there is no road for the Indian.

The mothers see into the future,
Beyond the end of that Chieftain
Who shall be the last of the race
Which allowed only death to a coward.

The square, cold cheeks, lips firm-set,
The hot, straight glance, and the throat-line,
Held like a stag's on the cliff,
Shall be swept by the night-winds, and vanish!

The mountains glitter in the snow
A thousand leagues asunder;
Yet here, amid the banquet's glow,
I hear their voice of thunder;
Each giant's ice-bound goblet clinks;
A flowing stream is summoned;
Wachusett to Ben Nevis drinks;
Monadnock to Ben Lomond!

Though years have clipped the eagle's plume
That crowned the chieftain's bonnet,
The sun still sees the heather bloom,
The silver mists lie on it;

With tartan kilt and philibeg,
What stride was ever bolder
Than his who showed the naked leg
Beneath the plaided shoulder?

The echoes sleep on Cheviot's hills,
That heard the bugles blowing
When down their sides the crimson rills
With mingled blood were flowing;
The hunts where gallant hearts were game,
The slashing on the bor...

If ever sea-maid, from her coral cave,
Beneath the hum of the great surge, has loved
To pass delighted from her green abode,
And, seated on a summer bank, to sing
No earthly music; in a spot like this,
The bard might feign he heard her, as she dried
Her golden hair, yet dripping from the main,
In the slant sunbeam.
So the pensive bard
Might image, warmed by this enchanting scene,
The ideal form; but though such things are not,
He who has ever felt a thought refined;
He who has wandered on the sea of life,
Forming delightful visions of a home
Of beauty and repose; he who has loved,
With filial warmth his country, will not pass
Without a look of more than tenderness
On all the scene; from where the pensile birch
Bends on the bank, amid the clustered gr...

Love is too young to know what conscience is,
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body’s treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,
But rising at thy name doth point out thee,
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her ‘love,’ for whose dear love I rise and fall.

In Nature’s pieces still I see
Some error, that might mended be;
Something my wish could still remove,
Alter or add; but my fair love
Was fram’d by hands far more divine
For she hath ev’ry beauteous line;
Yet I had been far happier,
Had Nature, that made me, made her.
Then likeness might, that love creates,
Have made her love what now she hates;
Yet, I confess, I cannot spare
From her just shape the smallest hair;
Nor need I beg from all the store
Pf heaven for her one beauty more.
She hath too much divinity for me;
Ye gods, teach her some more humanity.

Of old, with goodwill from the skies,
    The holy angels came;
They walked the earth with human eyes,
    And passed away in flame.

But now the angels are withdrawn,
    Because the flowers can speak;
With Christ, we see the dayspring dawn
    In every snowdrop meek.

God sends them forth; to God they tend;
    Not less with love they burn,
That to the earth they lowly bend,
    And unto dust return.

No miracle in them hath place,
    For this world is their home;
An utterance of essential grace
    The angel-snowdrops come.

(Obiit Nov. 18, 1909)

America grows poorer day by day -
Richer and richer, I have heard some say:
They thought of a poor wealth I do not heed -
For, one by one, the men who dreamed the dream
That was America, and is now no more,
Have gone in flame through that mysterious door,
And scarcely one remains, in all our need.

The dream goes with the dreamer - ah! beware,
Country of facile silver and of gold,
To slight the gentle strength of a pure prayer;
America, all made out of a dream -
A dream of good men in the days of old;
What if the dream should fade and none remain
To tell your children the old dream again!

Therefore, with laurel and with tears and rue,
Stand by his grave this sad November day,
Sadder that he untimely goes away,
W...

The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen,
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so....
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

With lyre Orphean, see a Bard explore
    The central caverns of the mornless Night,
    Where never Muse perform'd harmonious rite
    Till now! - and lo! upon the sparry floor,
Advance, to welcome him, each Sister Power,
    Petra, stern Queen, Fossilia, cold and bright,
    And call their Gnomes, to marshal in his sight
    The gelid incrust, and the veined ore,
And flashing gem. - Then, while his songs pourtray
    The mystic virtues gold and gems acquire,
    With every charm that mineral scenes display,
Th' imperial Sisters praise the daring Lyre,
    And grateful hail its new and powerful lay,
    That seats them high amid the Muses' Choir.

1: Petra, and Fossilia, are Personifications of the first and last division of the Fossil Kingdom. The Author of this ...

Yes! The land we love
Is a land of pretty girls,
In grand variety;
With their many colored eyes
And their multi-colored curls,
They'll steal thy heart from thee.

If you travel in the North,
One will gleam in glory forth,
With her blue eyes, O, so blue!
And her flash of golden hair
Will be flirting in the air,
While entrancing all the soul in you.
Oho! My Boy! Oho!

Always for your weal and never for your woe,
Your little heart will gallop on the go,
And it will not give you rest
Within your manly breast,
Till you land yourself in toto at her toe.
Oho! My Boy! Oho!

If you travel in the South,
You will find a rosy mouth,
And a black eye, O so black!
And some strands of raven hair
Will purloin your heart just th...

Ye storm-winds of Autumn
Who rush by, who shake
The window, and ruffle
The gleam-lighted lake;
Who cross to the hill-side
Thin-sprinkled with farms,
Where the high woods strip sadly
Their yellowing arms;
Ye are bound for the mountains,
Ah, with you let me go
Where your cold distant barrier,
The vast range of snow,
Through the loose clouds lifts dimly
Its white peaks in air,
How deep is their stillness!
Ah! would I were there!

But on the stairs what voice is this I hear,
Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear?
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Or was it from some sun-fleck’d mountain-brook
That the sweet voice its upland clearness took?
Ah! it comes nearer,
Sweet notes,...

A modern Poet addresses his Muse, to whom he has devoted the best Years of his Life

I.

Not here, O belovéd! not here let us part, in the city, but there!
Out there where the storm can enfold us, on the hills, where its breast is made bare:
Its breast, that is rainy and cool as the fern that drips by the fall
In the luminous night of' the woodland where winds to the waters call.
Not here, O belovéd! not here! but there! out there in the storm!

The rush and the reel of the heavens, the tem pest, whose rapturous arm
Shall seize us and sweep us together, resistless as passions seize men,
Through the rocking world of the woodland, with its multitude music, and then,
With the rain on our lips, belovéd! in the heart of the night's wild hell,
One last, long kiss forever, and...

Love built a crimson house,
I know it well,
That he might have a home
Wherein to dwell.

Poor Love that roved so far
And fared so ill,
Between the morning star
And the Hollow Hill,

Before he found the vale
Where he could bide,
With memory and oblivion
Side by side.

He took the silver dew
And the dun red clay,
And behold when he was through
How fair were they!

The braces of the sky
Were in its girth,
That it should feel no jar
Of the swinging earth;

That sun and wind might bleach
But not destroy
The house that he had builded
For his joy.

"Here will I stay," he said,
"And roam no more,
And dust when I am dead
Shall keep the door."

There trooping dreams by night

The wan light of a stormy dawn
Gleamed on a tossing ship:
It was the In Memoriam
Upon a mourning trip.

Wild waves were on the windward bow,
And breakers on the lee;
And through her sides the women heard
The seething of the sea.

“O Captain!” cried a widow fair,
Her plump white hands clasped she,
“Thinkst thou, if drowned in this dread storm,
That savèd we shall be?”

“You speak in riddles, lady dear,
How savèd can we be
If we are drowned?” “Alas, I mean
In Paradise!” said she.

“O I’ve sailed North, and I’ve sailed South”
(He was a godless wight),
“But boy or man, since my days began,
That shore I ne’er did sight!”

The Captain told the First Mate bold
What that fair lady said;
The First Mate sneered in h...

Come away, the clouds are high,
Put the flashing needles by.
Many days are not to spare,
Or to waste, my fairest fair!
All is ready. Come to-day,
For the nightingale her lay,
When she findeth that the whole
Of her love, and all her soul,
Cannot forth of her sweet throat,
Sobs the while she draws her breath,
And the bravery of her note
In a few days altereth.

Come, ere she despond, and see
In a silent ecstasy
Chestnuts heave for hours and hours
All the glory of their flowers
To the melting blue above,
That broods over them like love.
Leave the garden walls, where blow
Apple-blossoms pink, and low
Ordered beds of tulips fine.
Seek the blossoms made divine
With a scent that is their soul.
These are soulless. Bring the whit...