O heart of mine, we shouldn't
        Worry so!
What we've missed of calm we couldn't
        Have, you know!
What we've met of stormy pain,
And of sorrow's driving rain,
We can better meet again,
        If it blow!

We have erred in that dark hour
        We have known,
When our tears fell with the shower,
        All alone! -
Were not shine and shadow blent
As the gracious Master meant? -
Let us temper our content
        With His own.

For, we know, not every morrow
        Can be sad;
So, forgetting all the sorrow
        We have had,
Let us fold away our fears,
And put by our foolish tears,
And through all the coming years
    Just be glad.

    Gregory Wenner's wife was by the sea
    When Gregory Wenner killed himself, half sick
    And half malingering, and otiose.
    She wept, sent for a doctor to be braced,
    Induced a friend to travel with her west
    To bury Gregory Wenner; did not know
    That Gregory Wenner was in money straits
    Until she read the paper, or had lost
    His building in the loop. The man had kept
    His worries from her ailing ears, was glad
    To keep her traveling, or taking cures.

    She came and buried Gregory Wenner; found
    His fortune just a shell, the building lost,
    A little money in the bank, a store
    Far out on Lake Street, forty worthless acres
    In northern Indiana, twenty lots
    In some Montana village. Here she was,
    A wi...

The moon and all her starry train
    Were fading from the morning sky,
When home the ball-room belle again
Returned, with throbbing pulse and brain,
    Flushed cheek and tearful eye.

The plume that danced above her brow,
    The gem that sparkled in her zone,
The scarf of spangled leaf and bough,
Were laid aside--they mocked her now,
    When desolate and lone.

That night how many hearts she won!
    The reigning belle, she could not stir,
But, like the planets round the sun,
Her suitors followed--all but one--
    One all the world to her!

And she had lost him!--Marvel not
    That lady's eyes with tears were wet!
Though love by man is soon forgot,
It never yet was woman's lot
    To love and to forget.

1.

Oh! yes, I will own we were dear to each other;
The friendships of childhood, though fleeting, are true;
The love which you felt was the love of a brother,
Nor less the affection I cherish'd for you.


2.

But Friendship can vary her gentle dominion;
The attachment of years, in a moment expires:
Like Love, too, she moves on a swift-waving pinion,
But glows not, like Love, with unquenchable fires.


3.

Full oft have we wander'd through Ida together,
And blest were the scenes of our youth, I allow:
In the spring of our life, how serene is the weather!
But Winter's rude tempests are gathering now.


4.

No more with Affection shall Memory blending,
The wonted delights of our childhood retrace:
When ...

The crimson life-drops from a virgin heart
Pierced to the core by Cupid's fatal dart.

1.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

2.
I see the Deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone, -
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

3.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace wit...

Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot
Where eight days later you were to lie,
And be spoken of as one who was not;
Beholding it with a cursory eye
As alien from you, though under its tree
You soon would halt everlastingly.

I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat
At your side that eve I should not have seen
That the countenance I was glancing at
Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,
Nor have read the writing upon your face,
"I go hence soon to my resting-place;

"You may miss me then. But I shall not know

Poor little heart!
Did they forget thee?
Then dinna care! Then dinna care!

Proud little heart!
Did they forsake thee?
Be debonair! Be debonair!

Frail little heart!
I would not break thee:
Could'st credit me? Could'st credit me?

Gay little heart!
Like morning glory
Thou'll wilted be; thou'll wilted be!

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
- Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

1866.

I was reading a letter of yours to-day,
The date - O a thousand years ago!
The postmark is there - the month was May:
How, in God's name, did I let you go?
What wonderful things for a girl to say!
And to think that I hadn't the sense to know -
What wonderful things for a man to hear!
O still beloved, O still most dear.

"Duty" I called it, and hugged the word
Close to my side, like a shirt of hair;
You laughed, I remember, laughed like a bird,
And somehow I thought that you didn't care.
Duty! - and Love, with her bosom bare!
No wonder you laughed, as we parted there -
Then your letter came with this last good-by -
And I sat splendidly down to die.

Nor Duty, nor Death, would have aught of me:
"He is Love's," they said, "he cannot be ours;"
...

Stopped in the straight when the race was his own
Look at him cutting it—cur to the bone!
Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
May be they used him too much at the start.
May be Fate's weight-cloth are breaking his heart.

And some are sulky, while some will plunge.
(So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!)
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge.
(There! There! Who wants to kill you?)
Some, there are losses in every trade,
Wreck their hearts ere bitted and made,
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.

Sing, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,
The grand, austere, imperial utterance.
Which drives my soul before it back to days
In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high
Past broken hills, and when the polar gale
Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath
That speaks for ever of the White South Land
Alone with God and Silence in the cold,
I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss,

A story shining with a woman’s love!
And who that knows that love can ever doubt
How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;
For while th...

All hushed of glee,
The last chill bee
Clings wearily
To the dying aster.

The leaves drop faster:
And all around, red as disaster,
The forest crimsons with tree on tree.

A butterfly,
The last to die,
Wings heavily by,
Weighed down with torpor.

The air grows sharper;
And the wind in the trees, like some sad harper,
Sits and sorrows with sigh on sigh.

The far crows call;
The acorns fall;
And over all
The Autumn raises
Dun mists and hazes,
Through which her soul, it seemeth, gazes
On ghosts and dreams in carnival.

The end is near;
The dying Year
Leans low to hear
Her own heart breaking,
And Beauty taking
Her flight, and all my dreams forsaking
My soul, bowed down 'mid the sad and...

1837.


    The sunshine streaming through the stainèd glass
    Touched her with rosy colors as she stood,
    The maiden Queen of all the British realm,
    In the old Abbey on that soft June day.
    Youth shone within her eyes, where God had set
    All steadfastness, and high resolve, and truth;
    Youth flushed her cheek, dwelt on the smooth white brow
    Whereon the heavy golden circlet lay.

    The ashes of dead kings, the history of
    A nation's growth, of strife, and victory,
    The mighty past called soft through aisle and nave:
    "Be strong, O Queen; be strong as thou art fair!"
    A virgin, white of soul and unafraid,
    Since back of her was God, and at her feet
    A people loyal to the core, and strong,
    And loving w...

I went and stood outside myself,
Spelled the dark sky
And ship-lights nigh,
And grumbling winds that passed thereby.

Then next inside myself I looked,
And there, above
All, shone my Love,
That nothing matched the image of.

Beyond myself again I ranged;
And saw the free
Life by the sea,
And folk indifferent to me.

O 'twas a charm to draw within
Thereafter, where
But she was; care
For one thing only, her hid there!

But so it chanced, without myself
I had to look,
And then I took
More heed of what I had long forsook:

The boats, the sands, the esplanade,
The laughing crowd;
Light-hearted, loud
Greetings from some not ill-endowed;

The evening sunlit cliffs, the talk,
Hailings and halts...

There falls with every wedding chime
A feather from the wing of Time.
You pick it up, and say “How fair
To look upon its colors are!”
Another drops day after day            
Unheeded; not one word you say.
When bright and dusky are blown past,
Upon the hearse there nods the last.

'The soul is its own witness and its own refuge'


Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast:
Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still;
It folds itself around with peace,
Where thoughts alike of good or ill
In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast
For comfort for its hopes and fears:
The Mighty Mother bows at last;
She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens--there
The fire of beauty smites through pain:
A glory moves amid despair,
The Mother takes her child again.

'Tis sweet to recollect life's past controls,
And turn to days of sorrow when they're bye,
And think of gentle friends and feeling souls
That offered shelter when the storm was high,--
It thrills one's heart:--As mariners have turn'd,
When 'scap'd from shipwreck 'mid the billows' roar,
To look on fragments that the tempest spurn'd,
On which they clung, and struggled to the shore,
So sweet it is to turn.--And, hour by hour,
Reflection muses on the good and great,
That lent a portion of their wealthy power,
And sav'd a wormling from destruction's fate.

Oft to the patron of her first essays
The rural muse, O Radstock, turns her eye,
Not with the fulsome noise of fawning praise,
But soul's deep gushings in a silent sigh;
As drooping blossoms, dwindling deep ...