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To His Friend To Avoid Contention Of Words. | Robert Herrick | Words beget anger; anger brings forth blows;
Blows make of dearest friends immortal foes.
For which prevention, sociate, let there be
Betwixt us two no more logomachy.
Far better 'twere for either to be mute,
Than for to murder friendship by dispute.
|
Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part III. - XXVII - Thanksgiving After Childbirth | William Wordsworth | Woman! the Power who left his throne on high,
And deigned to wear the robe of flesh we wear,
The Power that thro' the straits of Infancy
Did pass dependent on maternal care,
His own humanity with Thee will share,
Pleased with the thanks that in his People's eye
Thou offerest up for safe Delivery
From Childbirth's perilous throes. And should the Heir
Of thy fond hopes hereafter walk inclined
To courses fit to make a mother rue
That ever he was born, a glance of mind
Cast upon this observance may renew
A better will; and, in the imagined view
Of thee thus kneeling, safety he may find. |
Woodman, Spare that Tree! | George Pope Morris | Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not.
That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o'er land and sea--
And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forebear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth-bound ties;
Oh, spare that aged oak,
Now towering to the skies!
When but an idle boy,
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here, too, my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand--
Forgive this foolish tear,
But let that old oak stand.
My heart-strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I've a hand to save,
thy axe shall harm it not. |
Lincoln | Vachel Lindsay | Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all,
That which is gendered in the wilderness
From lonely prairies and God's tenderness.
Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream,
Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream,
Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave,
Above that breast of earth and prairie-fire -
Fire that freed the slave. |
Karlene. | Bliss Carman (William) | Word of a little one born in the West,--
How like a sea-bird it comes from the sea,
Out of the league-weary waters' unrest
Blown with white wings, for a token, to me!
Blown with a skriel and a flurry of plumes
(Sea-spray and flight-rapture whirled in a gleam!)
Here for a sign of the comrade that looms
Large in the mist of my love as I dream.
He with the heart of an old violin,
Vibrant at every least stir in the place,
Lyric of woods where the thrushes begin,
Wave-questing wanderer, still for a space,--
What will the child of his be (so I muse),
Wood-flower, sea-flower, star-flower rare?
Worlds here to choose from, and which will she choose,
She whose first world is an armsweep of air?
Baby Karlene, you are wondering now
Why you can't reach the great moon that you see
Just at your hand on the edge of the bough
That waves in the window-pane--how can it be?
All your world yet hardly lies out of reach
Of ten little fingers and ten little toes.
You are a seed for the sky there to teach
(And the sun and the wind and the rain) as it grows.
Just a green leaf piercing up to the day,
Pale fleck of June to come, just to be seen
Through the rough crumble of rubble and clay
Lifting its loveliness, dawn-child, Karlene!
Fragile as fairycraft, dew-dream of love,--
Never a clod that has marred the slim stalk,
Never a stone but its frail fingers move,
Bent on the blue sky and nothing can balk!
Blue sky and wind-laughters, that is thy dream.
Ah the brave days when thy leafage shall toss
High where gold noondays and sunsets a-stream
Mix with its moving and kiss it across.
There the great clouds shall go lazily by,
Coo! thee with shadows and dazzle with shine,
Drench thee with rain-guerdons, bless thee with sky,
Till all the knowledge of earth shall be thine.
Wind from the ice-floe and wind from the palm,
Wind from the mountains and wind from the lea--
How they will sing thee of tempest and calm!
How they will lure thee with tales of the sea!
What will you be in that summer, Karlene?
Apple-tree, cherry-tree, lily, or corn?
Red rose or yellow rose, gray leaf or green?
Which will you choose now the year's at its morn?
Somewhere even now in thy heart is the will,--
"I shall be Golden Rod, slender and tall--
I shall be Pond Lily, secret and still--
I shall be Sweetbriar, Queen of them all--
"I shall give shade for the weary to rest--
I shall grow flax for the naked to wear--
Figs for a feast and all comers to guest--
Wreaths that girls twine in the laugh of their hair--
"Ivy for scholars and myrtle for lovers,
Laurel for conquerors, poets, and kings--
Broad-spreading beech-boughs whose benison covers
Clamor of bird-notes and flutter of wings--
"I shall rise tall as an elm in my grace--
I shall be clothed as catalpa is clad--
Poets shall crown me with lyrics of praise--
Lovers for lure of my blossoms go mad!"
Which shall it be, baby? Guess you at all?
Only I know in the lull of the year
You have said now where your choosing shall fall,
Only you have not yet heard yourself, dear.
So, like a mocking-bird, up in the trees,
I watching wondering where you have grown,
Borrow a note from a birdfellow's glees,
Fittest to sing you, and make it my own.
Only I know as I wonder, Karlene,
Singing up here where you think me a star,
Heaven's still above me, and some one serene
Laughs in the blue sky and knows what you are. |
In Imitation Of Chaucer | Alexander Pope | Women ben full of Ragerie,
Yet swinken not sans secresie.
Thilke Moral shall ye understand,
From Schoole-boy's Tale of fayre Ireland:
Which to the Fennes hath him betake,
To filch the gray Ducke fro the Lake.
Right then, there passen by the Way
His Aunt, and eke her Daughters tway.
Ducke in his Trowses hath he hent,
Not to be spied of Ladies gent.
"But ho! our Nephew," (crieth one)
"Ho!" quoth another, "Cozen John;"
And stoppen, and lough, and callen out,
This sely Clerk full low doth lout:
They asken that, and talken this,
"Lo here is Coz, and here is Miss."
But, as he glozeth with Speeches soote,
The Ducke sore tickleth his Erse-roote:
Fore-piece and buttons all-to-brest,
Forth thrust a white neck, and red crest.
"Te-he," cry'd Ladies; Clerke nought spake:
Miss star'd; and gray Ducke crieth Quake.
"O Moder, Moder," (quoth the daughter)
"Be thilke same thing Maids longer a'ter?
"Bette is to pyne on coals and chalke,
"Then trust on Mon, whose yerde can talke." |
Horton Tide. | John Hartley | Wor yo ivver at Horton Tide?
It wor thear 'at aw won mi bride;
An the joy o' mi life,
Is mi dear little wife,
An we've three little childer beside.
Aw wor donn'd in a new suit o'clooas,
A cigar wor stuck under mi nooas,
Aw set aght for a spree,
An some frolics to see,
Full o' fun throo mi heead to mi tooas.
Aw met Lijah an Amos, an Bill,
An ov coorse wi' each one aw'd a gill;
Till aw felt rayther mazy,
But net at all crazy,
For aw didn't goa in for mi fill.
As a lad aw'd been bashful an shy,
An aw blushed if a woman went by,
But this day bi gooid luck,
Aw felt chock full o' pluck,
Soa to leet on aw sattled to try.
As aw wandered abaat along th' street,
Who, ov all i' this world should aw meet!
But Mary o' Jooas,
Lukkin red as a rooas,
A'a! but shoo wor bonny an sweet.
Aw nodded an walked bi her side,
To mak misen pleasant aw tried,
But shoo smiled as shoo sed,
'Aw wor wrang i' mi heead,'
An aw'm sewer aw dooan't think 'at shoo lied.
Then aw bowt her some parkin an spice,
An owt else 'at shoo fancied lukt nice,
Then we tuk a short walk,
An we had a long tawk;
Then aw axt if shoo thowt we should splice.
What happen'd at after yo'll guess, -
It wor heaven to me, an nowt less; -
For aw left Horton Tide,
Wi' a promised fair bride,
Soa mi frolic wor craand wi' success.
For shoo's one i' ten thaasand yo see;
An shoo shows 'at shoo's suited wi' me,
An yo chaps 'at want wives
'At will gladden yer lives,
Up at Horton yo'll find 'em to be. |
The Shires On The Moray Frith. | James McIntyre | Worthy of either song or story
Are the shires round frith of Moray,
Here lies the valley of Strathspey,
Famed for its music, lively, gay,
Elgin cathedral's 'prentice aisle
Is glory of that ruined pile.
What modern chisel now could trace
Fine sculpture of that ancient place,
And Forres famed for Sweno's stane
In honor of that kingly Dane,
'Graved with warriors runes and rhymes,
Long prior to historic times,
For a thousand years its been forgot
Who was victor Dane or Scot,
It is the country of McBeth
Where good King Duncan met his death,
And barren heath that place of fear
Stood witches cauldron of Shakespeare,
Nairn's Cawdor castle strong remains
Full worthy of the ancient Thanes,
And nestled 'neath the hills and bens
Queen of the moors, the lochs and glens,
Full proudly stands in vale of bliss
Chief Highland town of Inverness,
Near here the famous falls of Foyers
Where Burns and others tuned their lyres,
And the fatal field of dark Culloden
Where doughty clans were once down trodden,
Here men yet wear the tartan plaid
Ready to join the Highland Brigade,
And when the Frith you look across
The eye beholds Sutherland and Ross,
Where Duke has harnessed mighty team,
Plows hills and rocks and moors by steam,
Perhaps it may in part atone
For cruel clearings days bygone,
And Cromarty, whose wondrous mason,
First learned his geologic lesson,
Friends may rear a stately pillar,
The old red sand stone of Hugh Miller,
Ben Wyvis towers like monarch crowned,
Conspicuous o'er the hills around,
With crest 'ere white with driven snow,
Strathpeffer's water cure below.
|
Words | Ella Wheeler Wilcox | Words are great forces in the realm of life:
Be careful of their use. Who talks of hate,
Of poverty, of sickness, but sets rife
These very elements to mar his fate.
When love, health, happiness, and plenty hear
Their names repeated over day by day,
They wing their way like answering fairies near,
Then nestle down within our homes to stay.
Who talks of evil conjures into shape
The formless thing and gives it life and scope.
This is the law: then let no word escape
That does not breathe of everlasting hope.
|
The Desire Of The Moth | Madison Julius Cawein | Woman's a star, a rose;
Man but a moth, a bee:
High now as heaven she glows,
Low now as earth and sea:
Star of the world and rose,
Clothed on with mystery.
Ever a goal, a lure,
Man, for his joy and woe,
Strives to attain to her,
Beating wild wings below,
Dying to make him sure
If she be flame or snow. |
To A Faun. - Translations From Horace. | Charles Stuart Calverley | OD. iii. 18.
Wooer of young Nymphs who fly thee,
Lightly o'er my sunlit lawn
Trip, and go, nor injured by thee
Be my weanling herds, O Faun:
If the kid his doomed head bows, and
Brims with wine the loving cup,
When the year is full; and thousand
Scents from altars hoar go up.
Each flock in the rich grass gambols
When the month comes which is thine;
And the happy village rambles
Fieldward with the idle kine:
Lambs play on, the wolf their neighbour:
Wild woods deck thee with their spoil;
And with glee the sons of labour
Stamp thrice on their foe, the soil.
|
Deliverance From A Fit Of Fainting | Anne Bradstreet | Worthy art Thou, O Lord, of praise,
But ah! It's not in me.
My sinking heart I pray Thee raise
So shall I give it Thee.
My life as spider's webb's cut off,
Thus fainting have I said,
And living man no more shall see
But be in silence laid.
My feeble spirit Thou didst revive,
My doubting Thou didst chide,
And though as dead mad'st me alive,
I here a while might 'bide.
Why should I live but to Thy praise?
My life is hid with Thee.
O Lord, no longer be my days
Than I may fruitful be.
|
To Wordsworth | John Clare | Wordsworth I love, his books are like the fields,
Not filled with flowers, but works of human kind;
The pleasant weed a fragrant pleasure yields,
The briar and broomwood shaken by the wind,
The thorn and bramble o'er the water shoot
A finer flower than gardens e'er gave birth,
The aged huntsman grubbing up the root--
I love them all as tenants of the earth:
Where genius is, there often die the seeds;
What critics throw away I love the more;
I love to stoop and look among the weeds,
To find a flower I never knew before;
Wordsworth, go on--a greater poet be;
Merit will live, though parties disagree! |
The Faery Pipe | Madison Julius Cawein | Woods of wonder, wonder ways,
Where the Faery Piper plays,
Bidding all to up and follow
Over haunted hill and hollow,
And behold again the Fays
Whirling in a moonlit maze.
He whom once our Childhood knew,
Piper of the Dream-come-true;
Who with music reared us towers
Of Adventure, where the Hours
Wove enchantments; peopled too
With the deeds of Daring-do.
Oh, to hear the pipe he blows
Saying all of Let's-Suppose!
Who once bade us brave the danger
Of the Dragon, for the stranger,
Princess, who, to tell her woes,
Dropped from her high Tower a rose.
She, for whom we would have died,
To whose Tower the pipe was guide,
And from Witchcraft's power delivered.
How the dungeon-tower shivered
When our trumpet blast defied,
Challenging its giant pride!
Oh, again to stand and see
Vision grow reality!
Hear the Elfland bugles blowing,
And, beyond all seeing, knowing,
Gallop to our empery
There again in Fa'rie!
Oh, again to leave regret,
Fever of the world and fret!
Tears and loss and work and worry!
For the Land of Song and Story,
For that Land none can forget,
Of which Thought is minion yet. . . .
Woods of wonder, wonder ways,
Where the Faery Piper plays,
Saying, "Quit your melancholy!
Leave the world of work and folly!
Follow me to where the Fays
Trip it as in Childhood's days." |
Ben Karshook's Wisdom | Robert Browning | 'Would a man 'scape the rod?'
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,
'See that he turn to God
The day before his death.'
'Ay could a man enquire
When it shall come!' I say,
The Rabbi's eye shoots fire
'Then let him turn to-day! '
Quoth a young Sadducee:
'Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls?'
'Son, there is no reply!'
The Rabbi bit his beard:
'Certain, a soul have I
We may have none,' he sneer'd.
Thus Karshook, the Hiram's-Hammer,
The Right-hand Temple-column,
Taught babes in grace their grammar,
And struck the simple, solemn.
Rome, April 27, 1854 |
The Exile's Desire. | Victor-Marie Hugo | ("Si je pouvais voir, O patrie!")
[Bk. III. xxxvii.]
Would I could see you, native land,
Where lilacs and the almond stand
Behind fields flowering to the strand -
But no!
Can I - oh, father, mother, crave
Another final blessing save
To rest my head upon your grave? -
But no!
In the one pit where ye repose,
Would I could tell of France's woes,
My brethren, who fell facing foes -
But no!
Would I had - oh, my dove of light,
After whose flight came ceaseless night,
One plume to clasp so purely white. -
But no!
Far from ye all - oh, dead, bewailed!
The fog-bell deafens me empaled
Upon this rock - I feel enjailed -
Though free.
Like one who watches at the gate
Lest some shall 'scape the doom'd strait.
I watch! the tyrant, howe'er late,
Must fall! |
Motive | W. M. MacKeracher | Worthless, the man who works - he knows not why,
Whom naught inspires to his puny plan,
Who seeming plays his part instinctively:
Soulless, and falsely designated "man."
Wicked, who works from wish of worldly gain, -
His soul surrendered to th'accurs'd lust
Of pleasure partial, briefly to remain,
Of treasure liable to moth and rust.
Foolish and vain is he whose motive - fame,
Ruled by desire of honor and renown;
And fondly courting Fortune's fickle Dame, -
To-day she smiles, to-morrow she will frown.
But virtuous, noble, prompted from above,
Preluding now the perfect life again,
Is he, whose only inspiration, love,
Love to his God and to his fellow-men.
For love is naught but God's own nature, given,
In partial measure, down to man to come;
The sole delight of earth, the key to heaven;
Of all the virtues, centre, source, and sum.
|
On A Portrait Of Wordsworth By B. R. Haydon | Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Wordsworth upon Helvellyn! Let the cloud
Ebb audibly along the mountain-wind,
Then break against the rock, and show behind
The lowland valleys floating up to crowd
The sense with beauty. He with forehead bowed
And humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran thought of his own mind,
And very meek with inspirations proud,
Takes here his rightful place as poet-priest
By the high altar, singing prayer and prayer
To the higher Heavens. A noble vision free
Our Haydon's hand has flung out from the mist:
No portrait this, with Academic air!
This is the poet and his poetry. |
Luke | Bret Harte (Francis) | Wot's that you're readin'? a novel? A novel! well, darn my skin!
You a man grown and bearded and histin' such stuff ez that in
Stuff about gals and their sweethearts! No wonder you're thin ez a knife.
Look at me clar two hundred and never read one in my life!
That's my opinion o' novels. And ez to their lyin' round here,
They belong to the Jedge's daughter the Jedge who came up last year
On account of his lungs and the mountains and the balsam o' pine and fir;
And his daughter well, she read novels, and that's what's the matter with her.
Yet she was sweet on the Jedge, and stuck by him day and night,
Alone in the cabin up 'yer till she grew like a ghost, all white.
She wus only a slip of a thing, ez light and ez up and away
Ez rifle smoke blown through the woods, but she wasn't my kind no way!
Speakin' o' gals, d'ye mind that house ez you rise the hill,
A mile and a half from White's, and jist above Mattingly's mill?
You do? Well now thar's a gal! What! you saw her? Oh, come now, thar! quit!
She was only bedevlin' you boys, for to me she don't cotton one bit.
Now she's what I call a gal ez pretty and plump ez a quail;
Teeth ez white ez a hound's, and they'd go through a ten-penny nail;
Eyes that kin snap like a cap. So she asked to know 'whar I was hid?'
She did! Oh, it's jist like her sass, for she's peart ez a Katydid.
But what was I talking of? Oh! the Jedge and his daughter she read
Novels the whole day long, and I reckon she read them abed;
And sometimes she read them out loud to the Jedge on the porch where he sat,
And 'twas how 'Lord Augustus' said this, and how 'Lady Blanche' she said that.
But the sickest of all that I heerd was a yarn thet they read 'bout a chap,
'Leather-stocking' by name, and a hunter chock full o' the greenest o' sap;
And they asked me to hear, but I says, 'Miss Mabel, not any for me;
When I likes I kin sling my own lies, and thet chap and I shouldn't agree.'
Yet somehow or other that gal allus said that I brought her to mind
Of folks about whom she had read, or suthin belike of thet kind,
And thar warn't no end o' the names that she give me thet summer up here
'Robin Hood,' 'Leather-stocking' 'Rob Roy,' Oh, I tell you, the critter was queer!
And yet, ef she hadn't been spiled, she was harmless enough in her way;
She could jabber in French to her dad, and they said that she knew how to play;
And she worked me that shot-pouch up thar, which the man doesn't live ez kin use;
And slippers you see 'em down 'yer ez would cradle an Injin's papoose.
Yet along o' them novels, you see, she was wastin' and mopin' away,
And then she got shy with her tongue, and at last she had nothin' to say;
And whenever I happened around, her face it was hid by a book,
And it warn't till the day she left that she give me ez much ez a look.
And this was the way it was. It was night when I kem up here
To say to 'em all 'good-by,' for I reckoned to go for deer
At 'sun up' the day they left. So I shook 'em all round by the hand,
'Cept Mabel, and she was sick, ez they give me to understand.
But jist ez I passed the house next morning at dawn, some one,
Like a little waver o' mist got up on the hill with the sun;
Miss Mabel it was, alone all wrapped in a mantle o' lace
And she stood there straight in the road, with a touch o' the sun in her face.
And she looked me right in the eye I'd seen suthin' like it before
When I hunted a wounded doe to the edge o' the Clear Lake Shore,
And I had my knee on its neck, and I jist was raisin' my knife,
When it give me a look like that, and well, it got off with its life.
'We are going to-day,' she said, 'and I thought I would say good-by
To you in your own house, Luke these woods and the bright blue sky!
You've always been kind to us, Luke, and papa has found you still
As good as the air he breathes, and wholesome as Laurel Tree Hill.
'And we'll always think of you, Luke, as the thing we could not take away,
The balsam that dwells in the woods, the rainbow that lives in the spray.
And you'll sometimes think of mE, Luke, as you know you once used to say,
A rifle smoke blown through the woods, a moment, but never to stay.'
And then we shook hands. She turned, but a-suddent she tottered and fell,
And I caught her sharp by the waist, and held her a minit. Well,
It was only a minit, you know, thet ez cold and ez white she lay
Ez a snowflake here on my breast, and then well, she melted away
And was gone. . . . And thar are her books; but I says not any for me;
Good enough may be for some, but them and I mightn't agree.
They spiled a decent gal ez might hev made some chap a wife,
And look at me! clar two hundred and never read one in my life! |
The Workman And The Man With White Hands - A Dialogue | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | WORKMAN. Why do you come crawling up to us? What do ye want? You're none of us.... Get along!
MAN WITH WHITE HANDS. I am one of you, comrades!
THE WORKMAN. One of us, indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch - but yours, see, are white. And what do they smell of?
THE MAN WITH WHITE HANDS (offering his hands). Smell them.
THE WORKMAN (sniffing his hands). That's a queer start. Seems like a smell of iron.
THE MAN WITH WHITE HANDS. Yes; iron it is. For six long years I wore chains on them.
THE WORKMAN. And what was that for, pray?
THE MAN WITH WHITE HANDS. Why, because I worked for your good; tried to set free the oppressed and the ignorant; stirred folks up against your oppressors; resisted the authorities.... So they locked me up.
THE WORKMAN. Locked you up, did they? Serve you right for resisting!
Two Years Later.
THE SAME WORKMAN TO ANOTHER. I say, Pete.... Do you remember, the year before last, a chap with white hands talking to you?
THE OTHER WORKMAN. Yes;... what of it?
THE FIRST WORKMAN. They're going to hang him to-day, I heard say; that's the order.
THE SECOND WORKMAN. Did he keep on resisting the authorities?
THE FIRST WORKMAN. He kept on.
THE SECOND WORKMAN. Ah!... Now, I say, mate, couldn't we get hold of a bit of the rope they're going to hang him with? They do say, it brings good luck to a house!
THE FIRST WORKMAN. You're right there. We'll have a try for it, mate.
April 1878.
|
The Mocking Fairy | Walter De La Mare | "Won't you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?"
Quoth the Fairy, nidding, nodding in the garden;
" Can't you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?"
Quoth the Fairy, laughing softly in the garden;
But the air was still, the cherry boughs were still,
And the ivy-tod 'neath the empty sill,
And never from her window looked out Mrs. Gill
On the Fairy shrilly mocking in the garden.
"What have they done with you, you poor Mrs. Gill?"
Quoth the Fairy, brightly glancing in the garden;
"Where have they hidden you, you poor old Mrs. Gill?"
Quoth the Fairy dancing lightly in the garden;
But night's faint veil now wrapped the hill,
Stark 'neath the stars stood the dead-still Mill,
And out of her cold cottage never answered Mrs. Gill
The Fairy mimbling mambling in the garden.
|
For Hire | Morris Rosenfeld | Work with might and main,
Or with hand and heart,
Work with soul and brain,
Or with holy art,
Thread, or genius' fire--
Make a vest, or verse--
If 'tis done for hire,
It is done the worse. |
Nursery Rhyme. CLXI. Songs. | Unknown | Wooley Foster has gone to sea,
With silver buckles at his knee,
When he comes back he'll marry me, -
Bonny Wooley Foster!
Wooley Foster has a cow,
Black and white about the mow,
Open the gates and let her through,
Wooley Foster's ain cow!
Wooley Foster has a hen,
Cockle button, cockle ben,
She lay eggs for gentlemen,
But none for Wooley Foster! |
The Lament Of The Looking-Glass | Thomas Hardy | Words from the mirror softly pass
To the curtains with a sigh:
"Why should I trouble again to glass
These smileless things hard by,
Since she I pleasured once, alas,
Is now no longer nigh!"
"I've imaged shadows of coursing cloud,
And of the plying limb
On the pensive pine when the air is loud
With its aerial hymn;
But never do they make me proud
To catch them within my rim!
"I flash back phantoms of the night
That sometimes flit by me,
I echo roses red and white -
The loveliest blooms that be -
But now I never hold to sight
So sweet a flower as she." |
World, Take Good Notice | Walt Whitman | World, take good notice, silver stars fading,
Milky hue ript, weft of white detaching,
Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning,
Scarlet, significant, hands off warning,
Now and henceforth flaunt from these shores. |
In Memoriam. - Madam Pond, | Lydia Howard Sigourney | Widow of the late CALEB POND, Esq., died at Hartford, February 19th 1861, aged 73.
Would any think who marked the smile
On yon untroubled face,
That threescore years and ten had fled
Without a wrinkling trace?
Yet age doth sometimes skill to guard
The beauty of its prime,
And hold a quenchless lamp above
The water-floods of time.
And she, for whom we mourn, maintained
Through every change and care,
Those hallowed virtues of the soul
That keep the features fair.
They raised a little child to look
Into the coffin deep,
Who dream'd the lovely lady lay
But in a transient sleep,
And gazed upon the face of death
With eye of tranquil ray,
Well pleased, as with the snowy flowers,
That on her bosom lay.
Then on the sad procession moved,
And mid funereal gloom,
The only son was there to lay
His mother in the tomb.
Oh, memories of an only child,
How strong and rich ye are!
A wealth of concentrated love
That none beside can share.
And hence, the filial grief that swells,
When breaks its latest tie,
Flows onward with a fuller tide
Than meets the common eye.
With voice of holy prayer she pass'd
Forth from her pleasant door,
Where tender recollections dwell
Though she returns no more.
Even so the pure and pious rise
From tents of pain and woe,
But leave a precious transcript here
To guide us where they go. |
Denial In Women No Disheartening To Men. | Robert Herrick | Women, although they ne'er so goodly make it,
Their fashion is, but to say no, to take it. |
The Truth Of Woman | Walter Scott (Sir) | Woman's faith, and woman's trust
Write the characters in the dust;
Stamp them on the running stream,
Print them on the moon's pale beam,
And each evanescent letter
Shall be clearer, firmer, better,
And more permanent, I ween,
Than the thing those letters mean.
I have strain'd the spider's thread
'Gainst the promise of a maid;
I have weigh'd a grain of sand
'Gainst her plight of heart and hand;
I told my true love of the token,
How her faith proved light, and her word was broken:
Again her word and truth she plight,
And I believed them again ere night. |
Work, Neighbor, Work! | Louisa May Alcott | "Work, neighbor, work!
Do not stop to play;
Wander far and wide,
Gather all you may.
We are never like
Idle butterflies,
But like the busy bees,
Industrious and wise." |
Amour 23 | Michael Drayton | Wonder of Heauen, glasse of diuinitie,
Rare beautie, Natures joy, perfections Mother,
The worke of that vnited Trinitie,
Wherein each fayrest part excelleth other!
Loues Mithridate, the purest of perfection,
Celestiall Image, Load-stone of desire,
The soules delight, the sences true direction,
Sunne of the world, thou hart reuyuing fire!
Why should'st thou place thy Trophies in those eyes,
Which scorne the honor that is done to thee,
Or make my pen her name immortalize,
Who in her pride sdaynes once to look on me?
It is thy heauen within her face to dwell,
And in thy heauen, there onely, is my hell. |
Work Lads! | John Hartley | Work if tha can, it's thi duty to labor;
If able, show willin, - ther's plenty to do,
Ther's battles to feight withaat musket or sabre,
But if tha'll have pluck tha'll be safe to pool throo.
Ther's noa use sittin still wishin an sighin,
An waitin for Fortun to gie yo a lift;
For ther's others i'th' struggle an time keeps on flyin,
An him who wod conquer mun show he's some shift.
Ther's nobbut one friend 'at a chap can depend on,
If he's made up his mind to succeed in the strife;
A chap's but hissen 'at he can mak a friend on,
Unless he be blest wi' a sensible wife.
But nivver let wealth, wi' its glamour an glitter,
Be th' chief end o' life or yo'll find when too lat,
'At th' fruits ov yor labor will all have turned bitter,
An th' pleasures yo hoped for are all stale an flat.
Do gooid to yorsen, win wealth, fame, or power,
But i'th' midst ov it all keep this object i' view;
'At the mooar yo possess, let yor self-love sink lower,
An pure pleasur will spring from the gooid yo can do. |
Oonts | Rudyard Kipling | Wot makes the soldier's 'eart to penk, wot makes 'im to perspire?
It isn't standin' up to charge nor lyin' down to fire;
But it's everlastin' waitin' on a everlastin' road
For the commissariat camel an' 'is commissariat load.
O the oont*, O the oont, O the commissariat oont!
With 'is silly neck a-bobbin' like a basket full o' snakes;
We packs 'im like an idol, an' you ought to 'ear 'im grunt,
An' when we gets 'im loaded up 'is blessed girth-rope breaks.
Wot makes the rear-guard swear so 'ard when night is drorin' in,
An' every native follower is shiverin' for 'is skin?
It ain't the chanst o' being rushed by Paythans from the 'ills,
It's the commissariat camel puttin' on 'is bloomin' frills!
O the oont, O the oont, O the hairy scary oont!
A-trippin' over tent-ropes when we've got the night alarm!
We socks 'im with a stretcher-pole an' 'eads 'im off in front,
An' when we've saved 'is bloomin' life 'e chaws our bloomin' arm.
The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool,
The elephant's a gentleman, the battery-mule's a mule;
But the commissariat cam-u-el, when all is said an' done,
'E's a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan-child in one.
O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont!
The lumpy-'umpy 'ummin'-bird a-singin' where 'e lies,
'E's blocked the whole division from the rear-guard to the front,
An' when we get him up again, the beggar goes an' dies!
'E'll gall an' chafe an' lame an' fight, 'e smells most awful vile;
'E'll lose 'isself for ever if you let 'im stray a mile;
'E's game to graze the 'ole day long an' 'owl the 'ole night through,
An' when 'e comes to greasy ground 'e splits 'isself in two.
O the oont, O the oont, O the floppin', droppin' oont!
When 'is long legs give from under an' 'is meltin' eye is dim,
The tribes is up be'ind us, and the tribes is out in front,
It ain't no jam for Tommy, but it's kites an' crows for 'im.
So when the cruel march is done, an' when the roads is blind,
An' when we sees the camp in front an' 'ears the shots be'ind,
Ho! then we strips 'is saddle off, and all 'is woes is past:
'E thinks on us that used 'im so, and gets revenge at last.
O the oont, O the oont, O the floatin', bloatin' oont!
The late lamented camel in the water-cut 'e lies;
We keeps a mile be'ind 'im an' we keeps a mile in front,
But 'e gets into the drinkin'-casks, and then o' course we dies. |
Woman! When I Behold Thee Flippant, Vain | John Keats | Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies;
Without that modest softening that enhances
The downcast eye, repentant of the pain
That its mild light creates to heal again:
E'en then, elate, my spirit leaps, and prances,
E'en then my soul with exultation dances
For that to love, so long, I've dormant lain:
But when I see thee meek, and kind, and tender,
Heavens! how desperately do I adore
Thy winning graces; to be thy defender
I hotly burn to be a Calidore
A very Red Cross Knight a stout Leander
Might I be loved by thee like these of yore.
Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair;
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast,
Are things on which the dazzled senses rest
Till the fond, fixed eyes, forget they stare.
From such fine pictures, heavens! I cannot dare
To turn my admiration, though unpossess'd
They be of what is worthy, though not drest
In lovely modesty, and virtues rare.
Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark;
These lures I straight forget e'en ere I dine,
Or thrice my palate moisten: but when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
Ah! who can e'er forget so fair a being?
Who can forget her half retiring sweets?
God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
For man's protection. Surely the All-seeing,
Who joys to see us with his gifts agreeing,
Will never give him pinions, who intreats
Such innocence to ruin, who vilely cheats
A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
One's thoughts from such a beauty; when I hear
A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
Her form seems floating palpable, and near;
Had I e'er seen her from an arbour take
A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,
And o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake. |
Epigram On Hearing A Lady Talk Very Fast And Unintelligibly | Thomas Oldham | Words upon words impetuous rush along,
And tread each other's brains out as they throng.
* * * * *
'Admire my wife! did ever mortal eyes'
Cornuto, in a rapture, boasting cries
'Such a fine set of teeth of ivory view?
And such a fine complexion's ivory hue?
Fool! hide thy head! both her and thee we scorn:
Oft the wife's ivory makes the husband's horn.
* * * * *
I'm told Sir Pigmy mimics me; what then?
Don't we all know that monkies mimic men?
'I cannot say your poem I admire;
It wants originality and fire;
Besides, I find it, by no means, correct;
You've written it in haste, I should suspect,'
"What! do you think me then a jackass, pray?"
'I shall think so if you so loudly bray.'
* * * * *
A worthy man of rags
Intreats for charity
A rogue of money-bags.
'Pshaw! it at home begins.'
Then serve thyself and me;
For it will be no less
A cover to thy sins,
Than to my nakedness.
The Fair-one, at her toilet, thus exprest
The ambitious aims that swell'd her panting breast:
'Pull, Fanny, pull again, with all your might;
I must, to-day, be laced up very tight;
For, to a glorious conquest I aspire:
Know, that two Noblemen my charms admire!
Pull, then, good girl! I'll be so tightly laced,
That half-a-yard will measure round my waist.'
'Hold!' Cupid cries, 'for Love's, for Pity's sake;
You'll strangle Beauty, and my bowstring break.'
* * * * *
In altering thus and shortening his oration,
Sure the Reporters do Lord Flimsy wrong;
It well may fill his Lordship with vexation,
When he has toil'd so hard to make it long.
'I've writ an epigram; here, read it, do.
The critics praise it highly: what think you?'
"I don't much like it." 'No! 'tis very fine.'
"It may be to your taste 'tis not to mine."
'I say 'tis finely pointed.' "Well! so be it!
The point may be too fine for me to see it."
'Then, let me tell you, Sir, you must be blind.'
"Many more like me I'm afraid you'll find."
* * * * *
Wise radicals! to make it bear more fruit,
They fain would tear the tree up by the root.
Young trees, we know, may sometimes thrive transplanted,
But old ones can't; 'tis by all gardeners granted.
'Twill die; and when the good old tree is dead,
What sort of tree, pray, will they plant instead?
The Squire has long imagined that his son
Is deeply studying Coke and Lyttelton.
They meet. 'Dear Tom! to see you gives me joy.
How get you on in Law? my clever boy!
In practice too? But Tom, what bills you draw!
Expensive work this studying of the law!'
The sly young Templar gulls his easy Sire:
"O! I get on, Sir, to my heart's desire;
In chamber-practice I have much to do."
His answer in a certain sense is true.
* * * * *
To move her lover, a coquetish Miss
Began to sob, pretending she should faint;
Her maid restored her straight by whispering this:
'I fear, my lady, you forget your paint.' |
Beautiful Women | Walt Whitman | Women sit, or move to and fro--some old, some young;
The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young. |
Michelangelo | Vachel Lindsay | Would I might wake in you the whirl-wind soul
Of Michelangelo, who hewed the stone
And Night and Day revealed, whose arm alone
Could draw the face of God, the titan high
Whose genius smote like lightning from the sky -
And shall he mold like dead leaves in the grave?
Nay he is in us! Let us dare and dare.
God help us to be brave. |
A Helpmeet For Him. | Christina Georgina Rossetti | Woman was made for man's delight, -
Charm, O woman! Be not afraid!
His shadow by day, his moon by night,
Woman was made.
Her strength with weakness is overlaid;
Meek compliances veil her might;
Him she stays, by whom she is stayed.
World-wide champion of truth and right,
Hope in gloom, and in danger aid,
Tender and faithful, ruddy and white,
Woman was made. |
The Symphony | Alfred Noyes | Wonder in happy eyes
Fades, fades away:
And the angel-coloured skies
Whisper farewell.
Loveliness over the strings of the heart may stray
In fugitive melodies;
But Oh, the hand of the Master must not stay,
Even for a breath;
For to prolong one joy, or even to dwell
On one rich chord of pain,
Beyond the pulse of the song, would untune heaven
And drown the stars in death.
So youth with its love-note dies;
And beauty fades in the air,
To make the master-symphony immortal,
And find new life and deeper wonder there. |
The Father. | Friedrich Schiller | Work as much as thou wilt, alone thou'lt be standing forever,
Till by nature thou'rt joined forcibly on to the whole. |
With A Book | Ambrose Bierce | Words shouting, singing, smiling, frowning
Sense lacking.
Ah, nothing, more obscure than Browning,
Save blacking. |
Restlessness.* | Emma Lazarus | Would I had waked this morn where Florence smiles,
A-bloom with beauty, a white rose full-blown,
Yet rich in sacred dust, in storied stone,
Precious past all the wealth of Indian isles -
From olive-hoary Fiesole to feed
On Brunelleschi's dome my hungry eye,
And see against the lotus-colored sky,
Spring the slim belfry graceful as a reed.
To kneel upon the ground where Dante trod,
To breathe the air of immortality
From Angelo and Raphael - TO BE -
Each sense new-quickened by a demi-god.
To hear the liquid Tuscan speech at whiles,
From citizen and peasant, to behold
The heaven of Leonardo washed with gold -
Would I had waked this morn where Florence smile!
|
The Turning Of The Babies In The Bed | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Woman's sho' a cur'ous critter, an' dey ain't no doubtin' dat.
She's a mess o' funny capahs f'om huh slippahs to huh hat.
Ef you tries to un'erstan' huh, an' you fails, des' up an' say:
"D' ain't a bit o' use to try to un'erstan' a woman's way."
I don' mean to be complainin', but I 's jes' a-settin' down
Some o' my own obserwations, w'en I cas' my eye eroun'.
Ef you ax me fu' to prove it, I ken do it mighty fine,
Fu' dey ain't no bettah 'zample den dis ve'y wife o' mine.
In de ve'y hea't o' midnight, w'en I 's sleepin' good an' soun',
I kin hyeah a so't o' rustlin' an' somebody movin' 'roun'.
An' I say, "Lize, whut you doin'?" But she frown an' shek huh haid,
"Heish yo' mouf, I's only tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed.
"Don' you know a chile gits restless, layin' all de night one way?
An' you' got to kind o' 'range him sev'al times befo' de day?
So de little necks won't worry, an' de little backs won't break;
Don' you t'ink case chillun 's chillun dey hain't got no pain an' ache."
So she shakes 'em, an' she twists 'em, an' she tu'ns 'em 'roun' erbout,
'Twell I don' see how de chillun evah keeps f'om hollahin' out.
Den she lif's 'em up head down'ards, so's dey won't git livahgrown,
But dey snoozes des' ez peaceful ez a liza'd on a stone.
W'en hit's mos' nigh time fu' wakin' on de dawn o' jedgment day,
Seems lak I kin hyeah ol' Gab'iel lay his trumpet down an' say,
"Who dat walkin' 'roun' so easy, down on earf ermong de dead?"--
'T will be Lizy up a-tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed. |
Sestet - Sent To A Friend With A Volume Of Tennyson | Thomas Bailey Aldrich | Wouldst know the clash of knightly steel on steel?
Or list the throstle singing loud and clear?
Or walk at twilight by some haunted mere
In Surrey; or in throbbing London feel
Life's pulse at highest--hark, the minster's peal! . . .
Turn but the page, that various world is here! |
The Key. | Friedrich Schiller | Wouldst thou know thyself, observe the actions of others.
Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart. |
Satires Of Circumstances In Fifteen Glimpses - IV In The Room Of The Bride-Elect | Thomas Hardy | "Would it had been the man of our wish!"
Sighs her mother. To whom with vehemence she
In the wedding-dress the wife to be -
"Then why were you so mollyish
As not to insist on him for me!"
The mother, amazed: "Why, dearest one,
Because you pleaded for this or none!"
"But Father and you should have stood out strong!
Since then, to my cost, I have lived to find
That you were right and that I was wrong;
This man is a dolt to the one declined . . .
Ah! here he comes with his button-hole rose.
Good God I must marry him I suppose!" |
In Time Of Wars And Tumults | Thomas Hardy | "Would that I'd not drawn breath here!" some one said,
"To stalk upon this stage of evil deeds,
Where purposelessly month by month proceeds
A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread."
Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead
To the gross spectacles of this our day,
And never put on the proffered cloak of clay,
He had but known not things now manifested;
Life would have swirled the same. Morns would have dawned
On the uprooting by the night-gun's stroke
Of what the yester noonshine brought to flower;
Brown martial brows in dying throes have wanned
Despite his absence; hearts no fewer been broke
By Empery's insatiate lust of power.
1915. |
Titian | Vachel Lindsay | Would that such hills and cities round us sang,
Such vistas of the actual earth and man
As kindled Titian when his life began;
Would that this latter Greek could put his gold,
Wisdom and splendor in our brushes bold
Till Greece and Venice, children of the sun,
Become our every-day, and we aspire
To colors fairer far, and glories higher. |
The Artifice. | Friedrich Schiller | Wouldst thou give pleasure at once to the children of earth and the righteous?
Draw the image of lust adding the devil as well! |
St. Francis of Assisi | Vachel Lindsay | Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,
Brother of birds and trees, God's Troubadour,
Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor;
Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men,
Come, let us chant the canticle again
Of mother earth and the enduring sun.
God make each soul the lonely leper's slave;
God make us saints, and brave. |
Sunrise | Ralph Waldo Emerson | Would you know what joy is hid
In our green Musketaquid,
And for travelled eyes what charms
Draw us to these meadow farms,
Come and I will show you all
Makes each day a festival.
Stand upon this pasture hill,
Face the eastern star until
The slow eye of heaven shall show
The world above, the world below.
Behold the miracle!
Thou saw'st but now the twilight sad
And stood beneath the firmament,
A watchman in a dark gray tent,
Waiting till God create the earth,--
Behold the new majestic birth!
The mottled clouds, like scraps of wool,
Steeped in the light are beautiful.
What majestic stillness broods
Over these colored solitudes.
Sleeps the vast East in pleas'd peace,
Up the far mountain walls the streams increase
Inundating the heaven
With spouting streams and waves of light
Which round the floating isles unite:--
See the world below
Baptized with the pure element,
A clear and glorious firmament
Touched with life by every beam.
I share the good with every flower,
I drink the nectar of the hour:--
This is not the ancient earth
Whereof old chronicles relate
The tragic tales of crime and fate;
But rather, like its beads of dew
And dew-bent violets, fresh and new,
An exhalation of the time. |
The Channel Swimmer | Marriott Edgar | Would you hear a wild tale of adventure
Of a hero who tackled the sea,
A super-man swimming the ocean,
Then hark to the tale of Joe Lee.
Our Channel, our own Straits of Dover
Had heen swum by an alien lot:
Our British-born swimmers had tried it,
But that was as far as they'd got.
So great was the outcry in England,
Darts Players neglected their beer,
And the Chanc'Ior proclaimed from the Woolsack
As Joe Lee were the chap for this 'ere.
For in swimming baths all round the country
Joe were noted for daring and strength;
Quite often he'd dived in the deep end,
And thought nothing of swimming a length.
So they wrote him, care of Workhouse Master,
Joe were spending the summer with him,
And promised him two Christmas puddings
If over the Channel he'd swim.
Joe jumped into t' breach like an 'ero,
He said, "All their fears I'll relieve,
And it isn't their puddings I'm after,
As I told them last Christmas Eve.
"Though many have tackled the Channel
From Grisnez to Dover that is,
For the honour and glory of England
I'll swim from Dover to Gris-niz."
As soon as his words were made public
The newspapers gathered around
And offered to give him a pension
If he lost both his legs and got drowned.
He borrowed a tug from the Navy
To swim in the shelter alee,
The Wireless folk lent him a wavelength,
And the Water Board lent him the sea.
His wife strapped a mascot around him,
The tears to his eyes gently stole;
'Twere some guiness corks she had collected
And stitched to an old camisole.
He entered the water at daybreak,
A man with a camera stood near,
He said "Hurry up and get in, lad,
You're spoiling my view of the pier."
At last he were in, he were swimming
With a beautiful overarm stroke,
When the men on the tug saw with horror
That the rope he were tied to had broke.
Then down came a fog, thick as treacle,
The tug looked so distant and dim
A voice shouted "Help, I am drowning,"
Joe listened and found it were him.
The tug circled round till they found him,
They hauled him aboard like a sack,
Tied a new tow-rope around him,
Smacked him and then threw him back.
'Twere at sunset, or just a bit later,
That he realized all wasn't right,
For the tow-rope were trailing behind him
And the noose round his waist getting tight.
One hasty glance over his shoulder,
He saw in a flash what were wrong.
The Captain had shut off his engine,
Joe were towing the Tugboat along.
On and on through the darkness he paddled
Till he knew he were very near in
By the way he kept bumping the bottom
And hitting the stones with his chin.
Was it Grisniz he'd reached?... No, it wasn't,
The treacherous tide in its track
Had carried him half-way to Blackpool
And he had to walk all the way back. |
Epitaph On Elizabeth | Ben Jonson | Wouldst thou hear what man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbor give
To more virture than doth live.
If at all she had a fault,
Leave it buried in this vault.
One name was Elizabeth,
Th' other let it sleep with death;
Fitter, where it died to tell,
Than that it lived at all. Farewell. |
The Eleusinian Festival. | Friedrich Schiller | Wreathe in a garland the corn's golden ear!
With it, the Cyane [31] blue intertwine
Rapture must render each glance bright and clear,
For the great queen is approaching her shrine,
She who compels lawless passions to cease,
Who to link man with his fellow has come,
And into firm habitations of peace
Changed the rude tents' ever-wandering home.
Shyly in the mountain-cleft
Was the Troglodyte concealed;
And the roving Nomad left,
Desert lying, each broad field.
With the javelin, with the bow,
Strode the hunter through the land;
To the hapless stranger woe,
Billow-cast on that wild strand!
When, in her sad wanderings lost,
Seeking traces of her child,
Ceres hailed the dreary coast,
Ah, no verdant plain then smiled!
That she here with trust may stay,
None vouchsafes a sheltering roof;
Not a temple's columns gay
Give of godlike worship proof.
Fruit of no propitious ear
Bids her to the pure feast fly;
On the ghastly altars here
Human bones alone e'er dry.
Far as she might onward rove,
Misery found she still in all,
And within her soul of love,
Sorrowed she o'er man's deep fall.
"Is it thus I find the man
To whom we our image lend,
Whose fair limbs of noble span
Upward towards the heavens ascend?
Laid we not before his feet
Earth's unbounded godlike womb?
Yet upon his kingly seat
Wanders he without a home?"
"Does no god compassion feel?
Will none of the blissful race,
With an arm of miracle,
Raise him from his deep disgrace?
In the heights where rapture reigns
Pangs of others ne'er can move;
Yet man's anguish and man's pains
My tormented heart must prove."
"So that a man a man may be,
Let him make an endless bond
With the kind earth trustingly,
Who is ever good and fond
To revere the law of time,
And the moon's melodious song
Who, with silent step sublime,
Move their sacred course along."
And she softly parts the cloud
That conceals her from the sight;
Sudden, in the savage crowd,
Stands she, as a goddess bright.
There she finds the concourse rude
In their glad feast revelling,
And the chalice filled with blood
As a sacrifice they bring.
But she turns her face away,
Horror-struck, and speaks the while
"Bloody tiger-feasts ne'er may
Of a god the lips defile,
He needs victims free from stain,
Fruits matured by autumn's sun;
With the pure gifts of the plain
Honored is the Holy One!"
And she takes the heavy shaft
From the hunter's cruel hand;
With the murderous weapon's haft
Furrowing the light-strown sand,
Takes from out her garland's crown,
Filled with life, one single grain,
Sinks it in the furrow down,
And the germ soon swells amain.
And the green stalks gracefully
Shoot, ere long, the ground above,
And, as far as eye can see,
Waves it like a golden grove.
With her smile the earth she cheers,
Binds the earliest sheaves so fair,
As her hearth the landmark rears,
And the goddess breathes this prayer:
"Father Zeus, who reign'st o'er all
That in ether's mansions dwell,
Let a sign from thee now fall
That thou lov'st this offering well!
And from the unhappy crowd
That, as yet, has ne'er known thee,
Take away the eye's dark cloud,
Showing them their deity!"
Zeus, upon his lofty throne,
Harkens to his sister's prayer;
From the blue heights thundering down,
Hurls his forked lightning there,
Crackling, it begins to blaze,
From the altar whirling bounds,
And his swift-winged eagle plays
High above in circling rounds.
Soon at the feet of their mistress are kneeling,
Filled with emotion, the rapturous throng;
Into humanity's earliest feeling
Melt their rude spirits, untutored and strong.
Each bloody weapon behind them they leave,
Rays on their senses beclouded soon shine,
And from the mouth of the queen they receive,
Gladly and meekly, instruction divine.
All the deities advance
Downward from their heavenly seats;
Themis' self 'tis leads the dance,
And, with staff of justice, metes
Unto every one his rights,
Landmarks, too, 'tis hers to fix;
And in witness she invites
All the hidden powers of Styx.
And the forge-god, too, is there,
The inventive son of Zeus;
Fashioner of vessels fair
Skilled in clay and brass's use.
'Tis from him the art man knows
Tongs and bellows how to wield;
'Neath his hammer's heavy blows
Was the ploughshare first revealed.
With projecting, weighty spear,
Front of all, Minerva stands,
Lifts her voice so strong and clear,
And the godlike host commands.
Steadfast walls 'tis hers to found,
Shield and screen for every one,
That the scattered world around
Bind in loving unison.
The immortals' steps she guides
O'er the trackless plains so vast,
And where'er her foot abides
Is the boundary god held fast;
And her measuring chain is led
Round the mountain's border green,
E'en the raging torrent's bed
In the holy ring is seen.
All the Nymphs and Oreads too
Who, the mountain pathways o'er,
Swift-foot Artemis pursue,
All to swell the concourse, pour,
Brandishing the hunting-spear,
Set to work, glad shouts uprise,
'Neath their axes' blows so clear
Crashing down the pine-wood flies.
E'en the sedge-crowned God ascends
From his verdant spring to light,
And his raft's direction bends
At the goddess' word of might,
While the hours, all gently bound,
Nimbly to their duty fly;
Rugged trunks are fashioned round
By her skilled hand gracefully.
E'en the sea-god thither fares;
Sudden, with his trident's blow,
He the granite columns tears
From earth's entrails far below;
In his mighty hands, on high,
Waves he them, like some light ball,
And with nimble Hermes by,
Raises up the rampart-wall.
But from out the golden strings
Lures Apollo harmony,
Measured time's sweet murmurings,
And the might of melody.
The Camoenae swell the strain
With their song of ninefold tone:
Captive bound in music's chain,
Softly stone unites to stone.
Cybele, with skilful hand,
Open throws the wide-winged door;
Locks and bolts by her are planned,
Sure to last forevermore.
Soon complete the wondrous halls
By the gods' own hands are made,
And the temple's glowing walls
Stand in festal pomp arrayed.
With a crown of myrtle twined,
Now the goddess queen comes there,
And she leads the fairest hind
To the shepherdess most fair.
Venus, with her beauteous boy,
That first pair herself attires;
All the gods bring gifts of joy,
Blessing their love's sacred fires.
Guided by the deities,
Soon the new-born townsmen pour,
Ushered in with harmonies,
Through the friendly open door.
Holding now the rites divine,
Ceres at Zeus' altar stands,
Blessing those around the shrine,
Thus she speaks, with folded hands:
"Freedom's love the beast inflames,
And the god rules free in air,
While the law of Nature tames
Each wild lust that lingers there.
Yet, when thus together thrown,
Man with man must fain unite;
And by his own worth alone
Can he freedom gain, and might."
Wreathe in a garland the corn's golden ear!
With it, the Cyane blue intertwine!
Rapture must render each glance bright and clear,
For the great queen is approaching her shrine,
She who our homesteads so blissful has given,
She who has man to his fellow-man bound:
Let our glad numbers extol then to heaven,
Her who the earth's kindly mother is found! |
Knowledge | Ella Wheeler Wilcox | Would you believe in Presences Unseen -
In life beyond this earthly life?
BE STILL: Be stiller yet; and listen. Set the screen
Of silence at the portal of your will.
Relax, and let the world go by unheard.
And seal your lips with some all-sacred word.
Breathe 'God,' in any tongue - it means the same;
LOVE ABSOLUTE: Think, feel, absorb the thought;
Shut out all else; until a subtle flame
(A spark from God's creative centre caught)
Shall permeate your being, and shall glow,
Increasing in its splendour, till, YOU KNOW.
Not in a moment, or an hour, or day
The knowledge comes; the power is far too great,
To win in any desultory way.
No soul is worthy till it learns to wait.
Day after day be patient, then, oh, soul;
Month after month - till, lo! the goal! the goal! |
Hymn To Aristogeiton And Harmodius | Edgar Allan Poe | I
Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I'll conceal,
Like those champions devoted and brave,
When they plunged in the tyrant their steel,
And to Athens deliverance gave.
II
Beloved heroes! your deathless souls roam
In the joy breathing isles of the blest;
Where the mighty of old have their home,
Where Achilles and Diomed rest.
III
In fresh myrtle my blade I'll entwine,
Like Harmodius, the gallant and good,
When he made at the tutelar shrine
A libation of Tyranny's blood.
IV
Ye deliverers of Athens from shame!
Ye avengers of Liberty's wrongs!
Endless ages shall cherish your fame,
Embalmed in their echoing songs! |
Concerning Emperors | Vachel Lindsay | I. God Send the Regicide
Would that the lying rulers of the world
Were brought to block for tyrannies abhorred.
Would that the sword of Cromwell and the Lord,
The sword of Joshua and Gideon,
Hewed hip and thigh the hosts of Midian.
God send that ironside ere tomorrow's sun;
Let Gabriel and Michael with him ride.
God send the Regicide.
II. A Colloquial Reply: To Any Newsboy
If you lay for Iago at the stage door with a brick
You have missed the moral of the play.
He will have a midnight supper with Othello and his wife.
They will chirp together and be gay.
But the things Iago stands for must go down into the dust:
Lying and suspicion and conspiracy and lust.
And I cannot hate the Kaiser (I hope you understand.)
Yet I chase the thing he stands for with a brickbat in my hand. |
Buddha | Vachel Lindsay | Would that by Hindu magic we became
Dark monks of jeweled India long ago,
Sitting at Prince Siddartha's feet to know
The foolishness of gold and love and station,
The gospel of the Great Renunciation,
The ragged cloak, the staff, the rain and sun,
The beggar's life, with far Nirvana gleaming:
Lord, make us Buddhas, dreaming. |
A Ditty Of No Tone. | James Whitcomb Riley | Piped to the Spirit of John Keats.
I.
Would that my lips might pour out in thy praise
A fitting melody - an air sublime, -
A song sun-washed and draped in dreamy haze -
The floss and velvet of luxurious rhyme:
A lay wrought of warm languors, and o'er-brimmed
With balminess, and fragrance of wild flowers
Such as the droning bee ne'er wearies of -
Such thoughts as might be hymned
To thee from this midsummer land of ours
Through shower and sunshine blent for very love.
II.
Deep silences in woody aisles wherethrough
Cool paths go loitering, and where the trill
Of best-remembered birds hath something new
In cadence for the hearing - lingering still
Through all the open day that lies beyond;
Reaches of pasture-lands, vine-wreathen oaks,
Majestic still in pathos of decay, -
The road - the wayside pond
Wherein the dragonfly an instant soaks
His filmy wing-tips ere he flits away.
III.
And I would pluck from out the dank, rich mould,
Thick-shaded from the sun of noon, the long
Lithe stalks of barley, topped with ruddy gold,
And braid them in the meshes of my song;
And with them I would tangle wheat and rye,
And wisps of greenest grass the katydid
Ere crept beneath the blades of, sulkily,
As harvest-hands went by;
And weave of all, as wildest fancy bid,
A crown of mingled song and bloom for thee. |
Wreath The Bowl. | Thomas Moore | Wreath the bowl
With flowers of soul,
The brightest wit can find us;
We'll take a flight
Towards heaven to-night,
And leave dull earth behind us.
Should Love amid
The wreaths be hid,
That joy, the enchanter, brings us,
No danger fear,
While wine is near,
We'll drown him if he stings us,
Then, wreath the bowl
With flowers of soul,
The brightest wit can find us;
We'll take a flight
Towards heaven to-night,
And leave dull earth behind us.
'Twas nectar fed
Of old, 'tis said,
Their Junos, Joves, Apollos;
And man may brew
His nectar too,
The rich receipt's as follows:
Take wine like this,
Let looks of bliss
Around it well be blended,
Then bring wit's beam
To warm the stream,
And there's your nectar, splendid!
So wreath the bowl
With flowers of soul,
The brightest wit can find us;
We'll take a flight
Towards heaven to-night,
And leave dull earth behind us.
Say, why did Time
His glass sublime
Fill up with sands unsightly,
When wine, he knew,
Runs brisker through,
And sparkles far more brightly?
Oh, lend it us,
And, smiling thus,
The glass in two we'll sever,
Make pleasure glide
In double tide,
And fill both ends for ever!
Then wreath the bowl
With flowers of soul
The brightest wit can find us;
We'll take a flight
Towards heaven to-night,
And leave dull earth behind us. |
Would You Know? | William Schwenck Gilbert | Would you know the kind of maid
Sets my heart a flame-a?
Eyes must be downcast and staid,
Cheeks must flush for shame-a!
She may neither dance nor sing,
But, demure in everything,
Hang her head in modest way,
With pouting lips that seem to say
"Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,
Though I die of shame-a."
Please you, that's the kind of maid
Sets my heart a flame-a!
When a maid is bold and gay,
With a tongue goes clang-a,
Flaunting it in brave array,
Maiden may go hang-a!
Sunflower gay and hollyhock
Never shall my garden stock;
Mine the blushing rose of May,
With pouting lips that seem to say,
"Oh, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,
Though I die for shame-a!"
Please you, that's the kind of maid
Sets my heart a flame-a! |
To The Theoretical Selector | Edward Dyson | Would you be the King, the strong man, first in council and in toil,
To the men who war with nature for possession of the soil?
Take an axe upon your shoulder, take a billy and a rug,
And go forward in the forest where no man has cut and dug,
Where the scrub-ferns grow like magic, and the gum-trees you must fell
Have their topmost boughs in heaven, and their tap-roots deep as hell.
Take the land the Powers would cheerfully devote to Smith or Brown,
Two miles or more from water and a hundred miles from town;
Fell, and scrub, and hew, and hunger, and when seven weeks are gone
You may have a clearing large enough to build a hut upon.
Then you furnish it with saplings and you carpet it with loam,
And you bring the kids and missus to their charming country home!
Rising early with the jackass, like a man of pith and push,
With axe in hand you sally forth to face the stubborn bush.
'Tis a mighty undertaking, and the odds are hard enough,
But the settler must be stubborn, and the settler must be tough,
And he strikes from morn till even with his strong arm bare and brown,
And he counts his gain by inches when the big gum rattles down.
So you slave and strive and suffer, for it's fearful work and slow
Ere the cabbages are solid and the spuds have room to grow.
By and bye to fruit and fowls and swine, as city swells advise,
You resort to make a fortune; but the venture proves unwise,
For the fruit-trees blight and wither, and the pigs die in their pens,
And the drought destroys the ducklings, and the dingoes eat the hens.
Years go on, and still the bush-wall rings your narrow clearing round,
But you've won a few good acres and a crop is on the ground,
And you harvest single-handed, and you rake the stubble clean,
For you lack the cash for wages and the marvellous machine;
Still you're thankful for small mercies though you're often sorely pushed
When the missus hasn't sunstroke and the baby isn't bushed.
Then, at last, when worn with work, and warped with years, and very grey,
When your mastering the mortgage and the railroad runs your way,
When your farm is looking home-like, and your sons are grown-up men,
You may talk to brown-faced farmers you may try to teach them then.
And if any kid-gloved critic starts to give you points on grain,
And a little hot-house farming does to make your errors plain,
You will rise up with a waddy, and you'll sympathise with Cain. |
Rose-Morals. | Sidney Lanier | I. - Red.
Would that my songs might be
What roses make by day and night -
Distillments of my clod of misery
Into delight.
Soul, could'st thou bare thy breast
As yon red rose, and dare the day,
All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest?
Say yea - say yea!
Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye;
The wind is up; so; drift away.
That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly,
I strive, I pray.
II. - White.
Soul, get thee to the heart
Of yonder tuberose: hide thee there -
There breathe the meditations of thine art
Suffused with prayer.
Of spirit grave yet light,
How fervent fragrances uprise
Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white
Virginities!
Mulched with unsavory death,
Grow, Soul! unto such white estate,
That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath,
Thy work, thy fate.
Baltimore, 1875. |
Upon Julia's Sweat. | Robert Herrick | Would ye oil of blossoms get?
Take it from my Julia's sweat:
Oil of lilies and of spike?
From her moisture take the like.
Let her breathe, or let her blow,
All rich spices thence will flow.
|
Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part III. - XXXIII - Regrets | William Wordsworth | Would that our scrupulous Sires had dared to leave
Less scanty measure of those graceful rites
And usages, whose due return invites
A stir of mind too natural to deceive;
Giving to Memory help when she would weave
A crown for Hope! I dread the boasted lights
That all too often are but fiery blights,
Killing the bud o'er which in vain we grieve.
Go, seek, when Christmas snows discomfort bring,
The counter Spirit found in some gay church
Green with fresh holly, every pew a perch
In which the linnet or the thrush might sing,
Merry and loud and safe from prying search,
Strains offered only to the genial Spring. |
The Legend Of Puck The Fairy. | Thomas Moore | Wouldst know what tricks, by the pale moonlight,
Are played by me, the merry little Sprite,
Who wing thro' air from the camp to the court,
From king to clown, and of all make sport;
Singing, I am the Sprite
Of the merry midnight,
Who laugh at weak mortals and love the moonlight.
To a miser's bed, where he snoring slept
And dreamt of his cash, I slyly crept;
Chink, chink o'er his pillow like money I rang,
And he waked to catch--but away I sprang,
Singing, I am the Sprite, etc.
I saw thro' the leaves, in a damsel's bower,
She was waiting her love at that starlight hour:
"Hist--hist!" quoth I, with an amorous sigh,
And she flew to the door, but away flew I,
Singing, I am the Sprite, etc.
While a bard sat inditing an ode to his love,
Like a pair of blue meteors I stared from above,
And he swooned--for he thought 'twas the ghost, poor man!
Of his lady's eyes, while away I ran,
Singing, I am the Sprite, etc. |
To ----- | Friedrich Schiller | Wouldst thou teach me the truth? Don't take the trouble! I wish not,
Through thee, the thing to observe, but to see thee through the thing. |
Shakespeare | Vachel Lindsay | Would that in body and spirit Shakespeare came
Visible emperor of the deeds of Time,
With Justice still the genius of his rhyme,
Giving each man his due, each passion grace,
Impartial as the rain from Heaven's face
Or sunshine from the heaven-enthroned sun.
Sweet Swan of Avon, come to us again.
Teach us to write, and writing, to be men. |
The Old Stockman's Lament | Henry Lawson | Wrap me up in me stockwhip and blanket,
And bury me deep down below,
Where this piffle and sham won't disgust me,
In the land where the coolibahs grow;
For I've stayed with some well-to-do people,
And I've dined with some middle-class folk;
And I've sorrowed by clock-tower and steeple
Till my heart for the Commonwealth's broke.
They have flown in another direction,
Who used to clack-clack by the hour
Of 'this awful Freetrade and Protection,'
Of our dear darling member 'in power,'
And the Higher Religion for Dossers,
And the Need of an Object for Drunks,
Now they're all of them Red or Blue Crossers,
With their tails sticking out of their trunks.
There are citified Martins in dozens,
The Darling Point Martins the pick,
Who used to be horrified cousins
Of a Martin we knew as 'Mad Mick.'
He is hanging out somewhere where French is;
But they heard he'd enlisted, somehow,
And 'twould paralyse Mick in the trenches
To know how he's glorified now.
You remember the George Henry Crosses?
They've packed up twelve trunks in despair.
He's the boss of the back-station bosses,
And Ernie's the son and the heir.
He has never put hands on a wether,
Nor heard a pithed store-bullock grunt;
So they're taking the mailboat to England
To see Ernie safe to the Front.
And each of the war-going parsons
Costs many a heart-breaking tear,
Like that caddish young cub of old Carson's,
All found and four hundred a year.
He feels not a word that he preaches,
But he will not be criticised there,
Where, out where the flying shell screeches,
Poor Tommy must fight, sweat and swear.
'Our relatives, too' (hang the Censor!)
Each girl has a tear on her cheek.
Cousin Roger has gone as dispenser
(Expenses and three pounds a week.
More risky than list'ning to sermons,
As some of our fellows will find,
Is a fierce fortnight's fight with the Germans
In front, and with Roger behind.)
And the Girls, they are writing like blazes,
And Auntie is moaning like hell;
And I wish I was under the daisies,
Or the bluegum would do just as well.
So I want to be wropped in me blanket,
And buried down, deep down, below;
Where this cant and this cackle won't reach me,
In the land where the coolibahs grow. |
Translations. - The Sixty-Seventh Psalm. (Luther's Song-Book.) | George MacDonald | Would that the Lord would grant us grace,
And in his volume write us!
With its clear shining let his face
To life eternal light us;
That we may know his work at length,
And what men him have faith in;
And Jesus Christ our health and strength
Be known to all the heathen,
And unto God convert them.
God then will thank, and thee will praise
The heathen with glad voices;
Let all the world for joy upraise
A song with mighty noises,
Because thou art earth's judge, O Lord,
Nor leav'st the righteous quailing;
Thy word it is both bed and board,
And for all folk availing
In the right path to keep them.
Let them thank God, and thee adore,
Thy folk of deeds of grace full.
The land grows fruitful more and more;
Thy word it is successful.
Bless us the Father and the Son,
And bless us, God, the Holy Ghost,
To whom by all be honour done!
Before him fear the human host!
Now heartily say Amen. |
The Worst Of It | Robert Browning | I.
Would it were I had been false, not you!
I that am nothing, not you that are all
I, never the worse for a touch or two
On my speckled hide; not you, the pride
Of the day, my swan, that a first fleck's fall
On her wonder of white must unswan, undo!
II.
I had dipped in life's struggle and, out again,
Bore specks of it here, there, easy to see,
When I found my swan and the cure was plain;
The dull turned bright as I caught your white
On my bosom: you saved me saved in vain
If you ruined yourself, and all through me!
III.
Yes, all through the speckled beast that I am,
Who taught you to stoop; you gave me yourself,
And bound your soul by the vows that damn:
Since on better thought you break, as you ought,
Vows words, no angel set down, some elf
Mistook, for an oath, an epigram!
IV.
Yes, might I judge you, here were my heart,
And a hundred its like, to treat as you pleased!
I choose to be yours, for my proper part,
Yours, leave or take, or mar me or make;
If I acquiesce, why should you be teased
With the conscience-prick and the memory-smart!
V.
But what will God say? Oh, my sweet,
Think, and be sorry you did this thing
Though earth were unworthy to feel your feet,
There's a heaven above may deserve your love:
Should you forfeit heaven for a snapt gold ring
And a promise broke, were it just or meet?
VI.
And I to have tempted you! I, who tired
Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
And you meant to have hated and despised
Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!
VII.
She, ruined? How? No heaven for her?
Crowns to give, and none for the brow
That looked like marble and smelt like myrrh?
Shall the robe be worn, and the palm-branch borne,
And she go graceless, she graced now
Beyond all saints, as themselves aver?
VIII.
Hardly! That must be understood!
The earth is your place of penance, then;
And what will it prove? I desire your good,
But, plot as I may, I can find no way
How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,
Nor prove too much for your womanhood.
IX.
It will come, I suspect, at the end of life,
When you walk alone, and review the past;
And I, who so long shall have done with strife,
And journeyed my stage and earned my wage
And retired as was right, I am called at last,
When the devil stabs you, to lend the knife.
X.
He stabs for the minute of trivial wrong,
Nor the other hours are able to save,
The happy, that lasted my whole life long:
For a promise broke, not for first words spoke,
The true, the only, that turn my grave
To a blaze of joy and a crash of song.
XI.
Witness beforehand! Off I trip
On a safe path gay through the flowers you flung:
My very name made great by your lip,
And my heart a-glow with the good I know
Of a perfect year when we both were young,
And I tasted the angels' fellowship.
XII.
And witness, moreover . . . Ah, but wait!
I spy the loop whence an arrow shoots!
It may be for yourself, when you meditate,
That you grieve for slain ruth, murdered truth.
'Though falsehood escape in the end, what boots?
How truth would have triumphed!' you sigh too late.
XIII.
Ay, who would have triumphed like you, I say!
Well, it is lost now; well, you must bear,
Abide and grow fit for a better day
You should hardly grudge, could I be your judge!
But hush! For you, can be no despair
There's amends: 't is a secret: hope and pray!
XIV.
For I was true at least oh, true enough!
And, Dear, truth is not as good as it seems!
Commend me to conscience! Idle stuff!
Much help is in mine, as I mope and pine,
And skulk through day, and scowl in my dreams
At my swan's obtaining the crow's rebuff.
XV.
Men tell me of truth now 'False!' I cry:
Of beauty 'A mask, friend! Look beneath!'
We take our own method, the devil and I,
With pleasant and fair and wise and rare
And the best we wish to what lives, is death;
Which even in wishing, perhaps we lie!
XVI.
Far better commit a fault and have done
As you, Dear! for ever; and choose the pure,
And look where the healing waters run,
And strive and strain to be good again,
And a place in the other world ensure,
All glass and gold, with God for its sun.
XVII.
Misery! What shall I say or do?
I cannot advise, or, at least, persuade:
Most like, you are glad you deceived me rue
No whit of the wrong: you endured too long.
Have done no evil and want no aid,
Will live the old life out and chance the new.
XVIII.
And your sentence is written all the same,
And I can do nothing, pray, perhaps
But somehow the world pursues its game,
If I pray, if I curse, for better or worse:
And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.
XIX.
Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
Be happy! Add but the other grace,
Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once: but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face. |
The Cuckoo-Clock | William Wordsworth | Wouldst thou be taught, when sleep has taken flight,
By a sure voice that can most sweetly tell,
How far off yet a glimpse of morning light,
And if to lure the truant back be well,
Forbear to covet a Repeater's stroke,
That, answering to thy touch, will sound the hour;
Better provide thee with a Cuckoo-clock
For service hung behind thy chamber-door;
And in due time the soft spontaneous shock,
The double note, as if with living power,
Will to composure lead, or make thee blithe as bird in bower.
List, Cuckoo, Cuckoo! oft tho' tempests howl,
Or nipping frost remind thee trees are bare,
How cattle pine, and droop the shivering fowl,
Thy spirits will seem to feed on balmy air:
I speak with knowledge, by that Voice beguiled,
Thou wilt salute old memories as they throng
Into thy heart; and fancies, running wild
Through fresh green fields, and budding groves among,
Will make thee happy, happy as a child:
Of sunshine wilt thou think, and flowers, and song,
And breathe as in a world where nothing can go wrong.
And know that, even for him who shuns the day
And nightly tosses on a bed of pain;
Whose joys, from all but memory swept away,
Must come unhoped for, if they come again;
Know that, for him whose waking thoughts, severe
As his distress is sharp, would scorn my theme,
The mimic notes, striking upon his ear
In sleep, and intermingling with his dream,
Could from sad regions send him to a dear
Delightful land of verdure, shower and gleam,
To mock the 'wandering' Voice beside some haunted stream.
O bounty without measure! while the grace
Of Heaven doth in such wise, from humblest springs,
Pour pleasure forth, and solaces that trace
A mazy course along familiar things,
Well may our hearts have faith that blessings come,
Streaming from founts above the starry sky,
With angels when their own untroubled home
They leave, and speed on nightly embassy
To visit earthly chambers, and for whom?
Yea, both for souls who God's forbearance try,
And those that seek his help, and for his mercy sigh. |
Upon Wrinkles | Robert Herrick | Wrinkles no more are, or no less,
Than beauty turn'd to sourness. |
John Brown. | James Whitcomb Riley | Writ in between the lines of his life-deed
We trace the sacred service of a heart
Answering the Divine command, in every part
Bearing on human weal: His love did feed
The loveless; and his gentle hands did lead
The blind, and lift the weak, and balm the smart
Of other wounds than rankled at the dart
In his own breast, that gloried thus to bleed.
He served the lowliest first - nay, them alone -
The most despised that e'er wreaked vain breath
In cries of suppliance in the reign whereat
Red Guilt sate squat upon her spattered throne. -
For these doomed there it was he went to death.
God! how the merest man loves one like that! |
A Song of Sighing | James Thomson - (Bysshe Vanolis) | Would some little joy to-day
Visit us, heart!
Could it but a moment stay,
Then depart,
With the flutter of its wings
Stirring sense of brighter things.
Like a butterfly astray
In a dark room;
Telling: Outside there is day,
Sweet flowers bloom,
Birds are singing, trees are green
Runnels ripple silver sheen.
Heart! we now have been so long
Sad without change,
Shut in deep from shine and song
Nor can range;
It would do us good to know
That the world is not all woe.
Would some little joy to-day
Visit us, heart!
Could it but a moment stay,
Then depart,
With the luster of its wings
Lighting dreams of happy things,
O sad my heart! |
The City Of Golf | Robert Fuller Murray | Would you like to see a city given over,
Soul and body, to a tyrannising game?
If you would, there's little need to be a rover,
For St. Andrews is the abject city's name.
It is surely quite superfluous to mention,
To a person who has been here half an hour,
That Golf is what engrosses the attention
Of the people, with an all-absorbing power.
Rich and poor alike are smitten with the fever;
Their business and religion is to play;
And a man is scarcely deemed a true believer,
Unless he goes at least a round a day.
The city boasts an old and learned college,
Where you'd think the leading industry was Greek;
Even there the favoured instruments of knowledge
Are a driver and a putter and a cleek.
All the natives and the residents are patrons
Of this royal, ancient, irritating sport;
All the old men, all the young men, maids and matrons--
The universal populace, in short.
In the morning, when the feeble light grows stronger,
You may see the players going out in shoals;
And when night forbids their playing any longer,
They tell you how they did the different holes
Golf, golf, golf--is all the story!
In despair my overburdened spirit sinks,
Till I wish that every golfer was in glory,
And I pray the sea may overflow the links.
One slender, struggling ray of consolation
Sustains me, very feeble though it be:
There are two who still escape infatuation,
My friend M'Foozle's one, the other's me.
As I write the words, M'Foozle enters blushing,
With a brassy and an iron in his hand . . .
This blow, so unexpected and so crushing,
Is more than I am able to withstand.
So now it but remains for me to die, sir.
Stay! There is another course I may pursue--
And perhaps upon the whole it would be wiser--
I will yield to fate and be a golfer too! |
Odes Of Anacreon - Ode LXXVII. | Thomas Moore | Would that I were a tuneful lyre,
Of burnished ivory fair,
Which, in the Dionysian choir,
Some blooming boy should bear!
Would that I were a golden vase.
That some bright nymph might hold
My spotless frame, with blushing grace,
Herself as pure as gold! |
Dithyrambics | Madison Julius Cawein | I
TEMPEST
Wrapped round of the night, as a monster is wrapped of the ocean,
Down, down through vast storeys of darkness, behold, in the tower
Of the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion,
Colossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour
Goes striding in rattling armor ...
The Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer
Of foam; and the Sylvan--green-housed--at her window of leaves appears;
--As a listening woman, who hears
The approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night;
And, loosening the loops of her locks,
With eyes full of love and delight,
From the couch of her rest in ardor and haste arises.--
The Nymph, as if breathed of the tempest, like fire surprises
The riotous bands of the rocks,
That face with a roar the shouting charge of the seas.
The Sylvan,--through troops of the trees,
Whose clamorous clans with gnarly bosoms keep hurling
Themselves on the guns of the wind,--goes wheeling and whirling.
The Nymph, of the waves' exultation upheld, her green tresses
Knotted with flowers of the hollow white foam, dives screaming;
Then bounds to the arms of the storm, who boisterously presses
Her hair and wild form to his breast that is panting and streaming.
The Sylvan,--hard-pressed by the wind, the Pan-footed air,--
On the violent backs of the hills,--
Like a flame that tosses and thrills
From peak to peak when the world of spirits is out,--
Is borne, as her rapture wills,
With glittering gesture and shout:
Now here in the darkness, now there,
From the rain-like sweep of her hair,--
Bewilderingly volleyed o'er eyes and o'er lips,--
To the lambent swell of her limbs, her breasts and her hips,
She flashes her beautiful nakedness out in the glare
Of the tempest that bears her away,--
That bears me away!
Away, over forest and foam, over tree and spray,
Far swifter than thought, far swifter than sound or than flame.
Over ocean and pine,
In arms of tumultuous shadow and shine ...
Though Sylvan and Nymph do not
Exist, and only what
Of terror and beauty I feel and I name
As parts of the storm, the awe and the rapture divine
That here in the tempest are mine,--
The two are the same, the two are forever the same.
II
CALM
Beautiful-bosomed, O night, in thy noon
Move with majesty onward! bearing, as lightly
As a singer may bear the notes of an exquisite tune,
The stars and the moon
Through the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament's halls;
Under whose sapphirine walls,
June, hesperian June,
Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly
The turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star,
The silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are,
Fill the land with languorous light and perfume.--
Is it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom?
The music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloom
Immaterial hosts
Of spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their keep,
That I hear, that I hear?
Invisible ghosts,--
Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hover
In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep
World-soul of the mother,
Nature;--who, over and over,
Both sweetheart and lover,
Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other,--
That appear, that appear?
In forest and field, on hill-land and lea,
As crystallized harmony,
Materialized melody,
An uttered essence peopling far and near
The hyaline atmosphere?...
Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blooms from flower and tree!
In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist,
In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst,
Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster,
Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.--
--O music of Earth! O God who the music inspired!
Let me breathe of the life of thy breath!
And so be fulfilled and attired
In resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death! |
Dr. Delany's Villa[1] | Jonathan Swift | WOULD you that Delville I describe?
Believe me, Sir, I will not gibe:
For who would be satirical
Upon a thing so very small?
You scarce upon the borders enter,
Before you're at the very centre.
A single crow can make it night,
When o'er your farm she takes her flight:
Yet, in this narrow compass, we
Observe a vast variety;
Both walks, walls, meadows, and parterres,
Windows and doors, and rooms and stairs,
And hills and dales, and woods and fields,
And hay, and grass, and corn, it yields:
All to your haggard brought so cheap in,
Without the mowing or the reaping:
A razor, though to say't I'm loth,
Would shave you and your meadows both.
Though small's the farm, yet here's a house
Full large to entertain a mouse;
But where a rat is dreaded more
Than savage Caledonian boar;
For, if it's enter'd by a rat,
There is no room to bring a cat.
A little rivulet seems to steal
Down through a thing you call a vale,
Like tears adown a wrinkled cheek,
Like rain along a blade of leek:
And this you call your sweet meander,
Which might be suck'd up by a gander,
Could he but force his nether bill
To scoop the channel of the rill.
For sure you'd make a mighty clutter,
Were it as big as city gutter.
Next come I to your kitchen garden,
Where one poor mouse would fare but hard in;
And round this garden is a walk
No longer than a tailor's chalk;
Thus I compare what space is in it,
A snail creeps round it in a minute.
One lettuce makes a shift to squeeze
Up through a tuft you call your trees:
And, once a year, a single rose
Peeps from the bud, but never blows;
In vain then you expect its bloom!
It cannot blow for want of room.
In short, in all your boasted seat,
There's nothing but yourself that's GREAT. |
Sakontala. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Wouldst thou the blossoms of spring, as well as the fruits of the autumn,
Wouldst thou what charms and delights, wouldst thou what plenteously, feeds,
Would thou include both Heaven and earth in one designation,
All that is needed is done, when I Sakontala name. |
King and No King | William Butler Yeats | 'Would it were anything but merely voice!'
The No King cried who after that was King,
Because he had not heard of anything
That balanced with a word is more than noise;
Yet Old Romance being kind, let him prevail
Somewhere or somehow that I have forgot,
Though he'd but cannon, Whereas we that had thought
To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale
Have been defeated by that pledge you gave
In momentary anger long ago;
And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We'll find so good a thing as that we have lost?
The hourly kindness, the day's common speech,
The habitual content of each with each
When neither soul nor body has been crossed. |
Wisdom And Prudence. | Friedrich Schiller | Wouldst thou, my friend, mount up to the highest summit of wisdom,
Be not deterred by the fear, prudence thy course may deride
That shortsighted one sees but the bank that from thee is flying,
Not the one which ere long thou wilt attain with bold flight. |
On Elizabeth L. H. | Ben Jonson | Epitaphs I
Wouldst thou hear what Man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much Beauty as could die:
Which in life did harbour give
To more Virtue than doth live.
If at all she had a fault,
Leave it buried in this vault.
One name was Elizabeth,
The other, let it sleep with death:
Fitter, where it died, to tell
Than that it lived at all. Farewell. |
The Lawn. | Robert Herrick | Would I see lawn, clear as the heaven, and thin?
It should be only in my Julia's skin,
Which so betrays her blood as we discover
The blush of cherries when a lawn's cast over. |
A Song-Sermon: | George MacDonald | Job xiv. 13-15.
RONDEL.
Would that thou hid me in the grave
And kept me with death's gaoler-care;
Until thy wrath away should wear
A sentence fixed thy prisoner gave!
I would endure with patience brave
So thou remembered I was there!
Would that thou hid me in the grave,
And kept me with death's gaoler-care!
To see thy creature thou wouldst crave--
Desire thy handiwork so fair;
Then wouldst thou call through death's dank air
And I would answer from the cave!
Would that thou hid me in the grave,
And kept me with death's gaoler-care! |
Would I, To Save My Dear Child? (Hymn) | Jean Ingelow | "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself."
Would I, to save my dear child dutiful,
Dare the white breakers on a storm-rent shore?
Ay, truly, Thou all good, all beautiful,
Truly I would, - then truly Thou would'st more.
Would I for my poor son, who desolate
After long sinning, sued without my door
For pardon, open it? Ay, fortunate
To hear such prayer, I would, - Lord, Thou would'st more.
Would I for e'en the stranger's weariness
And want divide, albeit 'twere scant, my store?
Ay, and mine enemy, sick, shelterless,
Dying, I would attend, - O, Lord, Thou more.
In dust and ashes my long infamy
Of unbelief I rue. My love before
Thy love I set: my heart's discovery,
Is sweet, - whate'er I would, Thou wouldest more.
I was Thy shelterless, sick enemy,
And Thou didst die for me, yet heretofore
I have fear'd; now learn I love's supremacy, -
Whate'er is known of love, Thou lovest more. |
To Bianca, To Bless Him. | Robert Herrick | Would I woo, and would I win?
Would I well my work begin?
Would I evermore be crowned
With the end that I propound?
Would I frustrate or prevent
All aspects malevolent?
Thwart all wizards, and with these
Dead all black contingencies:
Place my words and all works else
In most happy parallels?
All will prosper, if so be
I be kiss'd or bless'd by thee. |
To Dr. Blacklock, In Answer To A Letter. | Robert Burns | Ellisland, 21st Oct. 1789.
Wow, but your letter made me vauntie!
And are ye hale, and weel, and cantie?
I kenn'd it still your wee bit jauntie
Wad bring ye to:
Lord send you ay as weel's I want ye,
And then ye'll do.
The ill-thief blaw the heron south!
And never drink be near his drouth!
He tauld mysel' by word o' mouth,
He'd tak my letter:
I lippen'd to the chief in trouth,
And bade nae better.
But aiblins honest Master Heron,
Had at the time some dainty fair one,
To ware his theologic care on,
And holy study;
And tir'd o' sauls to waste his lear on
E'en tried the body.
But what dy'e think, my trusty fier,
I'm turn'd a gauger, Peace be here!
Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear,
Ye'll now disdain me!
And then my fifty pounds a year
Will little gain me.
Ye glaiket, gleesome, dainty damies,
Wha, by Castalia's wimplin' streamies,
Lowp, sing, and lave your pretty limbies,
Ye ken, ye ken,
That strang necessity supreme is
'Mang sons o' men.
I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies;
Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is,
I need na vaunt,
But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies,
Before they want.
Lord help me thro' this warld o' care!
I'm weary sick o't late and air!
Not but I hae a richer share
Than mony ithers:
But why should ae man better fare,
And a' men brithers?
Come, firm Resolve, take then the van,
Thou stalk o' carl-hemp in man!
And let us mind, faint-heart ne'er wan
A lady fair:
Wha does the utmost that he can,
Will whyles do mair.
But to conclude my silly rhyme,
(I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time,)
To make a happy fire-side clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
My compliments to sister Beckie;
And eke the same to honest Lucky,
I wat she is a dainty chuckie,
As e'er tread clay!
And gratefully, my guid auld cockie,
I'm yours for ay,
ROBERT BURNS. |
Abt Vogler | Robert Browning | (After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention)
I.
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly, alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!
II.
Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.
III.
And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night
Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.
IV.
In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man?s birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
V.
Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is, shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
VI.
All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
Had I written the same, made verse still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:
VII.
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world, loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
VIII.
Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
IX.
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
X.
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.
XI.
And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know.
XII.
Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep. |
Fresh Cheese And Cream. | Robert Herrick | Would ye have fresh cheese and cream?
Julia's breast can give you them:
And, if more, each nipple cries:
To your cream here's strawberries. |
When Trees Are Green. | Jean Blewett | Would you be glad of heart and good?
Would you forget life's toil and care?
Come, lose yourself in this old wood
When May's soft touch is everywhere.
The hawthorn trees are white as snow,
The basswood flaunts its feathery sprays,
The willows kiss the stream below
And listen to its flatteries:
"O willows supple, yellow, green,
Long have I flowed o'er stock and stone,
I say with truth I have not seen
A rarer beauty than your own!"
The rough-bark hickory, elm, and beech
With quick'ning thrill and growth are rife;
Oak, maple, through the heart of each
There runs a glorious tide of life.
Fresh leaves, young buds on every hand,
On trunk and limb a hint of red,
The gleam of poplars tall that stand
With God's own sunshine on their head.
The mandrake's silken parasol
Is fluttering in the breezes bold,
And yonder where the waters brawl
The buttercups show green and gold.
The slender grape-vine sways and weaves,
From sun-kissed sward and nook of gloom
There comes the smell of earth and leaves,
The breath of wild-flowers all abloom.
Spring's gleam is on the robin's breast,
Spring's joy is in the robin's song:
"My mate is in yon sheltered nest;
Ho! love is sweet and summer long!"
While full and jubilant and clear,
All the long day, from dawn till dark,
The trill of bobolink we hear,
Of hermit thrush and meadowlark.
Sit here among the grass and fern
Unmindful of the cares of life,
The lessons we have had to learn,
The hurts we've gotten in the strife.
There's youth in every breath we take,
Forgetfulness of loss and tears,
Within the heart there seems to wake
The gladness of the long past years.
Peace keeps us company to-day
In this old fragrant, shadowy wood;
We lift our eyes to heaven and say:
The world is fair and God is good. |
False Prophets. | George MacDonald | Would-be prophets tell us
We shall not re-know
Them that walked our fellows
In the ways below!
Smoking, smouldering Tophets
Steaming hopeless plaints!
Dreary, mole-eyed prophets!
Mean, skin-pledging saints!
Knowing not the Father
What their prophecies!
Grapes of such none gather,
Only thorns and lies.
Loving thus the brother,
How the Father tell?
Go without each other
To your heavenly hell! |
Becalmed | James Whitcomb Riley | 1
Would that the winds might only blow
As they blew in the golden long ago!
Laden with odors of Orient isles
Where ever and ever the sunshine smiles,
And the bright sands blend with the shady trees,
And the lotus blooms in the midst of these.
2
Warm winds won from the midland vales
To where the tress of the Siren trails
O'er the flossy tip of the mountain phlox
And the bare limbs twined in the crested rocks,
High above as the seagulls flap
Their lopping wings at the thunder-clap.
3
Ah! That the winds might rise and blow
The great surge up from the port below,
Bloating the sad, lank, silken sails
Of the Argo out with the swift, sweet gales
That blew from Colchis when Jason had
His love's full will and his heart was glad -
When Medea's voice was soft and low.
Ah! That the winds might rise and blow! |
The Unknown | Edgar Lee Masters | Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.
As a boy reckless and wanton,
Wandering with gun in hand through the forest
Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield,
I shot a hawk perched on the top
Of a dead tree. He fell with guttural cry
At my feet, his wing broken.
Then I put him in a cage
Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me
When I offered him food.
Daily I search the realms of Hades
For the soul of the hawk,
That I may offer him the friendship
Of one whom life wounded and caged.
Alexander Throckmorton
In youth my wings were strong and tireless,
But I did not know the mountains.
In age I knew the mountains
But my weary wings could not follow my vision -
Genius is wisdom and youth.
|
1827; Or, The Poet's Last Poem. | Thomas Gent | Ye Bards in all your thousand dens,
Great souls with fewer pence than pens,
Sublime adorers of Apollo,
With folios full, and purses hollow;
Whose very souls with rapture glisten,
When you can find a fool to listen;
Who, if a debt were paid by pun,
Would never be completely done.
Ye bright inhabitants of garrets,
Whose dreams are rich in ports and clarets,
Who, in your lofty paradise,
See aldermanic banquets rise--
And though the duns around you troop,
Still float in seas of turtle soup.
I here forsake the tuneful trade,
Where none but lordlings now are paid,
Or where some northern rogue sits puling,
(The curse of universal schooling)--
A ploughman to his country lost,
An author to his printer's cost--
A slave to every man who'll buy him,
A knave to every man who'll try him--
Yet let him take the pen, at once
The laurel gathers round his sconce!
On every subject superseded,
My favorite topics all invaded,
I scarcely dip my pen in praise,
When fifty bardlings grasp my bays;
Or let me touch a drop of satire,
(I once knew something of the matter),
Just fifty bardlings take the trouble,
To be my tuneful worship's double.
Fine similies that nothing fit,
Joe Miller's, that must pass for wit;
The dull, dry, brain-besieging jokes,
The humour that no laugh provokes--
The nameless, worthless, witless rancours,
The rage that souls of scribblers cankers--
(Administer'd in gall go thick,
It makes even Sunday critic's sick!)
Disgust my passion, fill my place,
And snatch my prize before my face.
If then I take the "brilliant" pen.
And "scorning measures" talk of men--
There Luttrel steps 'twixt me and fame--
So like, egad, we're just the same;
I never half squeeze out a thought,
But jumps its fellow on the spot--
My tenderest dreams, my fondest touch,
Are victims to his ready clutch;
The whirling waltz, the gay costume,
The porcelain tooth, the gallic bloom;
The vapid smiles, the lisping loves
Of turtles (never meant for doves)--
The dreary stuff that fills the ears,
Where all the orators are peers--
The hides reveal'd through ball-room dresses,
Where all the parties are peer-esses;
The dulness of the toujours gai,
The yawning night, the sleepy day,
The visages of cheese and chalk,
The drowsy, dreamy, languid talk;
The fifty other horrid things,
That strip old Time of both his wings!
There's not a topic of them all
But comes, hey presto! at his call.
Or when I turn my pen to love,
A theme that fits me like my glove,
A pang I've borne these twenty years
With ten-times twenty several dears,
Each glance a dart, each smile a quiver,
Stinging their bard from lungs to liver--
To work my ruin, or my cure,
Up starts thy pen, Anacreon Moore!
In vain I pour my shower of roses,
On which the matchless fair one dozes,
And plant around her conch the graces,
While jealous Venus breaks her laces,
To see a younger face promoted,
To see her own old face out-voted;
And myrtle branches twisting o'er her,
Bow down, each turn'd a true adorer.
Up starts the Irish Bard--in vain
I write, 'tis all against the grain:
In vain I talk of smiles or sighs,
The girls all have him in their eyes;
And not a soul--mamma, or miss--
But vows he's the sole Bard of Bliss!
Since first I dipp'd in the romantic,
A hundred thousand have run frantic--
There's not a hideous highland spot,
(Long fallowed to the core by Scott)--
No rill, through rack and thistle dribbling,
But has its deadlier crop of scribbling.
Each fen, and flat, and flood, and fell,
Gives birth to verses by the ell--
There Wordsworth, for his muse's sallies,
Claims all the ponds, the lanes, and alleys--
There Coleridge swears none else shall tune
A bag-pipe to the list'ning moon;
On come in clouds the scribbling columns,
Each prowling for his next three volumes.
I scorn the rascal tribe, and spurn all
The yearly, monthly, and diurnal.
I write the finest things that ever
Made duchess fond, or marquiss clever--
(Although I'd rather half turn Turk,
The thing's such monstrous up-hill work).
My ton's the very cream of fashion,
My passion the sublimest passion,
My rage satanic, love the same,
Of all blue flames, the bluest flame--
My piety perpetual matins,
A quaker propp'd on double pattens;
My lovely girls the most precocious,
My beaus delightfully atrocious!
Yet scarcely have I play'd my card,
When up comes politician Ward,
Before my face he trumps my trump,
Sweeps off my honours in the lump,
And never asking my permission,
Talks sermons to the third edition.
Or Boulogne, Highway Byeway, Grattan,
(The Pyrenees begin to flatten,
A feast denied to storm and shower,
The pen's the wonder-working power);
Or Smith, the master of "Addresses,"
Carves history out in modern messes:--
Tells how gay Charles cook'd up his collops,
How fleeced his friends, how paid his trollops--
How pledged his soul, and pawn'd his oath,
'Till none would give a straw for both;
And touching paupers for the Evil,
Touch'd England half way to the devil
Or Hook, picks up my favorite hits,
For when was friendship between wits?
Or Lyster, doubly dandyfied,
Fidgets his donkey by my side;
Or Bulwer rambles back from Greece,
Woolgathering from the Golden fleece--
Or forty volumes, piping hot,
Come blazing from volcano Scott;
When pens like their's play all my game.
The tasteless world must bear the blame.
I had a budget, full of fan,
But here again, I'm lost, undone!
I'm so forestall'd--that faith, I could
Half quarrel with--my lively Hood:
For odd it is, my "Oddities,"
Are even all the same with his;
Would Sherwood (him of Paternoster),
Assist my pilferings to foster,
I'd turn free-booter--nay, I would
E'en play the part of robbing Hood--
But brother Wits should never quarrel,
Nor try to "pluck each other's laurel,"
And tho' my income's scarce enough
To find friend Petersham with snuff,
Here's peace to all! and kind regards!
And Brother Hood among the Bards.
So all, friends, countrymen, and lovers,
With one, or one and twenty covers,
Farewell to all;--my glories past,
I pen my lay, my sweetest, last!
Another Phoenix, build my nest
Of spices, Phoebus' very best,
Concentrating in these gay pages,
Wit, worth the wit of all the stages;
Love, tender as the midnight talk,
In softest summer's midnight walk,
With leave to all earth's fools to spurn 'em,
Nay (if they first will buy) to burn 'em. |
'Y' Are The Maiden Posies | Louisa May Alcott | "'Y' are the maiden posies,
And so graced,
To be placed
Fore damask roses.
Yet, though thus respected,
By and by
Ye do lie,
Poor girls, neglected.' |
The Sonnets Of Tommaso Campanella - To The Swiss. | Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni | Se voi pi' innalza.
Ye Alpine rocks! If less your peaks elate
To heaven exalt you than that gift divine,
Freedom; why do your children still combine
To keep the despots in their stolen state?
Lo, for a piece of bread from windows wide
You fling your blood, taking no thought what cause,
Righteous or wrong, your strength to battle draws;
So is your valour spurned and vilified.
All things belong to free men; but the slave
Clothes and feeds poorly. Even so from you
Broad lands and Malta's knighthood men withhold.
Up, free yourselves, and act as heroes do!
Go, take your own from tyrants, which you gave
So recklessly, and they so dear have sold! |
Beware O' Bonnie Ann. | Robert Burns | Tune - "Ye gallants bright."
I.
Ye gallants bright, I red ye right,
Beware o' bonnie Ann;
Her comely face sae fu' o' grace,
Your heart she will trepan.
Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
Her skin is like the swan;
Sae jimply lac'd her genty waist,
That sweetly ye might span.
II.
Youth, grace, and love attendant move,
And pleasure leads the van:
In a' their charms, and conquering arms,
They wait on bonnie Ann.
The captive bands may chain the hands,
But love enclaves the man;
Ye Gallants braw, I red you a',
Beware of bonnie Ann! |
Recollections. | Giacomo Leopardi | Ye dear stars of the Bear, I did not think
I should again be turning, as I used,
To see you over father's garden shine,
And from the windows talk with you again
Of this old house, where as a child I dwelt,
And where I saw the end of all my joys.
What charming images, what fables, once,
The sight of you created in my thought,
And of the lights that bear you company!
Silent upon the verdant clod I sat,
My evening thus consuming, as I gazed
Upon the heavens, and listened to the chant
Of frogs that in the distant marshes croaked;
While o'er the hedges, ditches, fire-flies roamed,
And the green avenues and cypresses
In yonder grove were murmuring to the wind;
While in the house were heard, at intervals,
The voices of the servants at their work.
What thoughts immense in me the sight inspired
Of that far sea, and of the mountains blue,
That yonder I behold, and which I thought
One day to cross, mysterious worlds and joys
Mysterious in the future fancying!
Of my hard fate unconscious, and how oft
This sorrowful and barren life of mine
I willingly would have for death exchanged!
Nor did my heart e'er tell me, I should be
Condemned the flower of my youth to spend
In this wild native region, and amongst
A wretched, clownish crew, to whom the names
Of wisdom, learning, are but empty sounds,
Or arguments of laughter and of scorn;
Who hate, avoid me; not from envy, no;
For they do not esteem me better than
Themselves, but fancy that I, in my heart,
That feeling cherish; though I strive, indeed,
No token of such feeling to display.
And here I pass my years, abandoned, lost,
Of love deprived, of life; and rendered fierce,
'Mid such a crowd of evil-minded ones,
My pity and my courtesy I lose,
And I become a scorner of my race,
By such a herd surrounded; meanwhile, fly
The precious hours of youth, more precious far
Than fame, or laurel, or the light of day,
Or breath of life: thus uselessly, without
One joy, I lose thee, in this rough abode,
Whose only guests are care and suffering,
O thou, the only flower of barren life!
The wind now from the tower of the town
The deep sound of the bell is bringing. Oh,
What comfort was that sound to me, a child,
When in my dark and silent room I lay,
Besieged by terrors, longing for the dawn!
Whate'er I see or hear, recalls to mind
Some vivid image, recollection sweet;
Sweet in itself, but O how bitter made
By painful sense of present suffering,
By idle longing for the past, though sad,
And by the still recurring thought, "I was"!
Yon gallery that looks upon the west;
Those frescoed walls, these painted herds, the sun
Just rising o'er the solitary plain,
My idle hours with thousand pleasures filled,
While busy Fancy, at my side, still spread
Her bright illusions, wheresoe'er I went.
In these old halls, when gleamed the snow without,
And round these ample windows howled the wind,
My sports resounded, and my merry words,
In those bright days, when all the mysteries
And miseries of things an aspect wear,
So full of sweetness; when the ardent youth
Sees in his untried life a world of charms,
And, like an unexperienced lover, dotes
On heavenly beauty, creature of his dreams!
O hopes, illusions of my early days! -
Of you I still must speak, to you return;
For neither flight of time, nor change of thoughts,
Or feelings, can efface you from my mind.
Full well I know that honor and renown
Are phantoms; pleasures but an idle dream;
That life, a useless misery, has not
One solid fruit to show; and though my days
Are empty, wearisome, my mortal state
Obscure and desolate, I clearly see
That Fortune robs me but of little. Yet,
Alas! as often as I dwell on you,
Ye ancient hopes, and youthful fancy's dreams,
And then look at the blank reality,
A life of ennui and of wretchedness;
And think, that of so vast a fund of hope,
Death is, to-day, the only relic left,
I feel oppressed at heart, I feel myself
Of every comfort utterly bereft.
And when the death, that I have long invoked,
Shall be at hand, the end be reached of all
My sufferings; when this vale of tears shall be
To me a stranger, and the future fade,
Fade from sight forever; even then, shall I
Recall you; and your images will make
Me sigh; the thought of having lived in vain,
Will then intrude, with bitterness to taint
The sweetness of that day of destiny.
Nay, in the first tumultuous days of youth,
With all its joys, desires, and sufferings,
I often called on death, and long would sit
By yonder fountain, longing, in its waves
To put an end alike to hope and grief.
And afterwards, by lingering sickness brought
Unto the borders of the grave, I wept
O'er my lost youth, the flower of my days,
So prematurely fading; often, too,
At late hours sitting on my conscious bed,
Composing, by the dim light of the lamp,
I with the silence and the night would moan
O'er my departing soul, and to myself
In languid tones would sing my funeral-song.
Who can remember you without a sigh,
First entrance into manhood, O ye days
Bewitching, inexpressible, when first
On the enchanted mortal smiles the maid,
And all things round in emulation smile;
And envy holds its peace, not yet awake,
Or else in a benignant mood; and when,
- O marvel rare! - the world a helping hand
To him extends, his faults excuses, greets
His entrance into life, with bows and smiles
Acknowledges his claims to its respect?
O fleeting days! How like the lightning's flash,
They vanish! And what mortal can escape
Unhappiness, who has already passed
That golden period, his own good time,
That comes, alas, so soon to disappear?
And thou, Nerina, does not every spot
Thy memory recall? And couldst thou e'er
Be absent from my thought? Where art thou gone,
That here I find the memory alone,
Of thee, my sweet one? Thee thy native place
Beholds no more; that window, whence thou oft
Wouldst talk with me, which sadly now reflects
The light of yonder stars, is desolate.
Where art thou, that I can no longer hear
Thy gentle voice, as in those days of old,
When every faintest accent from thy lips
Was wont to turn me pale? Those days have gone.
They have been, my sweet love! And thou with them
Hast passed. To others now it is assigned
To journey to and fro upon the earth,
And others dwell amid these fragrant hills.
How quickly thou hast passed! Thy life was like
A dream. While dancing there, joy on thy brow
Resplendent shone, anticipations bright
Shone in thy eyes, the light of youth, when Fate
Extinguished them, and thou didst prostrate lie.
Nerina, in my heart the old love reigns.
If I at times still go unto some feast,
Or social gathering, unto myself
I say: "Nerina, thou no more to feast
Dost go, nor for the ball thyself adorn."
If May returns, when lovers offerings
Of flowers and of songs to maidens bring,
I say: "Nerina mine, to thee spring ne'er
Returns, and love no more its tribute brings."
Each pleasant day, each flowery field that I
Behold, each pleasure that I taste, the thought
Suggest: "Nerina pleasure knows no more,
The face of heaven and earth no more beholds."
Ah, thou hast passed, for whom I ever sigh!
Hast passed; and still the memory of thee
Remains, and with each thought and fancy blends
Each varying emotion of the heart;
And will remain, so bitter, yet so sweet! |
An Evening at Vichy | Algernon Charles Swinburne | Written on the news of the death of Lord Leighton
A light has passed that never shall pass away,
A sun has set whose rays are unquelled of night.
The loyal grace, the courtesy bright as day,
The strong sweet radiant spirit of life and light
That shone and smiled and lightened on all men's sight,
The kindly life whose tune was the tune of May,
For us now dark, for love and for fame is bright.
Nay, not for us that live as the fen-fires live,
As stars that shoot and shudder with life and die,
Can death make dark that lustre of life, or give
The grievous gift of trust in oblivion's lie.
Days dear and far death touches, and draws them nigh,
And bids the grief that broods on their graves forgive
The day that seems to mock them as clouds that fly.
If life be life more faithful than shines on sleep
When dreams take wing and lighten and fade like flame,
Then haply death may be not a death so deep
That all things past are past for it wholly, fame,
Love, loving-kindness, seasons that went and came,
And left their light on life as a seal to keep
Winged memory fast and heedful of time's dead claim.
Death gives back life and light to the sunless years
Whose suns long sunken set not for ever. Time,
Blind, fierce, and deaf as tempest, relents, and hears
And sees how bright the days and how sweet their chime
Rang, shone, and passed in music that matched the clime
Wherein we met rejoicing, a joy that cheers
Sorrow, to see the night as the dawn sublime.
The days that were outlighten the days that are,
And eyes now darkened shine as the stars we see
And hear not sing, impassionate star to star,
As once we heard the music that haply he
Hears, high in heaven if ever a voice may be
The same in heaven, the same as on earth, afar
From pain and earth as heaven from the heaving sea.
A woman's voice, divine as a bird's by dawn
Kindled and stirred to sunward, arose and held
Our souls that heard, from earth as from sleep withdrawn,
And filled with light as stars, and as stars compelled
To move by might of music, elate while quelled,
Subdued by rapture, lit as a mountain lawn
By morning whence all heaven in the sunrise welled.
And her the shadow of death as a robe clasped round
Then: and as morning's music she passed away.
And he then with us, warrior and wanderer, crowned
With fame that shone from eastern on western day,
More strong, more kind, than praise or than grief might say,
Has passed now forth of shadow by sunlight bound,
Of night shot through with light that is frail as May.
May dies, and light grows darkness, and life grows death:
Hope fades and shrinks and falls as a changing leaf:
Remembrance, touched and kindled by love's live breath,
Shines, and subdues the shadow of time called grief,
The shade whose length of life is as life's date brief,
With joy that broods on the sunlight past, and saith
That thought and love hold sorrow and change in fief.
Sweet, glad, bright spirit, kind as the sun seems kind
When earth and sea rejoice in his gentler spell,
Thy face that was we see not; bereft and blind,
We see but yet, rejoicing to see, and dwell
Awhile in days that heard not the death-day's knell,
A light so bright that scarcely may sorrow find
One old sweet word that hails thee and mourns, Farewell. |
Morning Hymn (Hymnus Matutinus) | Aurelius Clemens Prudentius | English Translation below Original
Hymnus Matutinus
Nox et tenebrae et nubila,
confusa mundi et turbida,
lux intrat, albescit polus,
Christus venit, discedite.
Caligo terrae scinditur
percussa solis spiculo,
rebusque iam color redit
vultu nitentis sideris.
Sic nostra mox obscuritas
fraudisque pectus conscium
ruptis retectum nubibus
regnante pallescit Deo.
Tunc non licebit claudere
quod quisque fuscum cogitat,
sed mane clarescent novo
secreta mentis prodita.
Fur ante lucem squalido
inpune peccat tempore,
sed lux dolis contraria
latere furtum non sinit.
Versuta fraus et callida
amat tenebris obtegi,
aptamque noctem turpibus
adulter occultus fovet.
Sol ecce surgit igneus,
piget, pudescit, paenitet,
nec teste quisquam lumine
peccare constanter potest.
Quis mane sumptis nequiter
non erubescit poculis,
cum fit libido temperans
castumque nugator sapit?
Nunc, nunc severum vivitur,
nunc nemo tentat ludicrum,
inepta nunc omnes sua
vultu colorant serio.
Haec hora cunctis utilis,
qua quisque, quod studet, gerat,
miles, togatus, navita,
opifex, arator, institor.
Illum forensis gloria,
hunc triste raptat classicum,
mercator hinc ac rusticus
avara suspirant lucra.
At nos lucelli ac faenoris
fandique prorsus nescii,
nec arte fortes bellica,
te, Christe, solum novimus.
Te mente pura et simplici,
te voce, te cantu pio
rogare curvato genu
flendo et canendo discimus.
His nos lucramur quaestibus,
hac arte tantum vivimus,
haec inchoamus munera,
cum sol resurgens emicat.
Intende nostris sensibus,
vitamque totam dispice,
sunt multa fucis inlita,
quae luce purgentur tua.
Durare nos tales iube,
quales, remotis sordibus
nitere pridem iusseras,
Iordane tinctos flumine.
Quodcumque nox mundi dehinc
infecit atris nubibus,
tu, rex Eoi sideris,
vultu sereno inlumina.
Tu sancte, qui taetram picem
candore tingis lacteo
ebenoque crystallum facis,
delicta terge livida.
Sub nocte Iacob caerula
luctator audax angeli,
eo usque dum lux surgeret,
sudavit inpar praelium.
Sed cum iubar claresceret,
lapsante claudus poplite
femurque victus debile
culpae vigorem perdidit.
Nutabat inguen saucium,
quae corporis pars vilior
longeque sub cordis loco
diram fovet libidinem.
Hae nos docent imagines,
hominem tenebris obsitum,
si forte non cedat Deo,
vires rebellis perdere.
Erit tamen beatior,
intemperans membrum cui
luctando claudum et tabidum
dies oborta invenerit.
Tandem facessat caecitas,
quae nosmet in praeceps diu
lapsos sinistris gressibus
errore traxit devio.
Haec lux serenum conferat
purosque nos praestet sibi:
nihil loquamur subdolum,
volvamus obscurum nihil.
Sic tota decurrat dies,
ne lingua mendax, ne manus,
oculive peccent lubrici,
ne noxa corpus inquinet.
Speculator adstat desuper,
qui nos diebus omnibus
actusque nostros prospicit
a luce prima in vesperum.
Hic testis, hic est arbiter,
his intuetur quidquid est,
humana quod mens concipit;
hunc nemo fallit iudicem.
Morning Hymn
Newly Translated Into English Verse By R. Martin Pope.
Ye clouds and darkness, hosts of night
That breed confusion and affright,
Begone! o'erhead the dawn shines clear,
The light breaks in and Christ is here.
Earth's gloom flees broken and dispersed,
By the sun's piercing shafts coerced:
The daystar's eyes rain influence bright
And colours glimmer back to sight.
So shall our guilty midnight fade,
The sin-stained heart's gross dusky shade:
So shall the King's All-radiant Face
Sudden unveil our deep disgrace.
No longer then may we disguise
Our dark intents from those clear eyes:
Yea, at the dayspring's advent blest
Our inmost thoughts will stand confest.
The thief his hidden traffic plies
Unmarked before the dawn doth rise:
But light, the foe of guile concealed,
Lets no ill craft lie unrevealed.
Fraud and Deceit love only night,
Their wiles they practise out of sight;
Curtained by dark, Adultery too
Doth his foul treachery pursue,
But slinks abashed and shamed away
Soon as the sun rekindles day,
For none can damning light resist
And 'neath its rays in sin persist.
Who doth not blush o'ertook by morn
And his long night's carousal scorn?
For day subdues the lustful soul,
And doth all foul desires control.
Now each to earnest life awakes,
Now each his wanton sport forsakes;
Now foolish things are put away
And gravity resumes her sway.
It is the hour for duty's deeds,
The path to which our labour leads,
Be it the forum, army, sea,
The mart or field or factory.
One seeks the plaudits of the bar,
One the stern trumpet calls to war:
Those bent on trade and husbandry
At greed's behest for lucre sigh.
Mine is no rhetorician's fame,
No petty usury I claim;
Nor am I skilled to face the foe:
'Tis Thou, O Christ, alone I know.
Yea, I have learnt to wait on Thee
With heart and lips of purity,
Humbly my knees in prayer to bend,
And tears with songs of praise to blend.
These are the gains I hold in view
And these the arts that I pursue:
These are the offices I ply
When the bright sun mounts up the sky.
Prove Thou my heart, my every thought,
Search into all that I have wrought:
Though I be stained with blots within,
Thy quickening rays shall purge my sin.
O may I ever spotless be
As when my stains were cleansed by Thee,
Who bad'st me 'neath the Jordan's wave
Of yore my soil'd spirit lave.
If e'er since then the world's gross night
Hath cast its curtain o'er my sight,
Dispel the cloud, O King of grace,
Star of the East! with thy pure face.
Since Thou canst change, O holy Light,
The blackest hue to milky white,
Ebon to clearness crystalline,
Wash my foul stains and make me clean.
'Twas 'neath the lonely star-blue night
That Jacob waged the unequal fight,
Stoutly he wrestled with the Man
In darkness, till the day began.
And when the sun rose in the sky
He halted on his shrivelled thigh:
His natural might had ebbed away,
Vanquished in that tremendous fray.
Not wounded he in nobler part
Nor smitten in life's fount, the heart:
But lust was shaken from his throne
And his foul empire overthrown.
Whereby we clearly learn aright
That man is whelmed by deadly night,
Unless he own God conqueror
And strive against His will no more.
Yet happier he whom rising morn
Shall find of nature's strength forlorn,
Whose warring flesh hath shrunk away,
Palsied by virtue's puissant sway.
And then at length let darkness flee,
Which all too long held us in fee,
'Mid wildering shadows made us stray
And led in devious tracks our way.
We pray Thee, Rising Light serene,
E'en as Thyself our hearts make clean:
Let no deceit our lips defile
Nor let our souls be vexed by guile.
O keep us, as the hours proceed,
From lying word and evil deed,
Our roving eyes from sin set free,
Our body from impurity.
For thou dost from above survey
The converse of each fleeting day:
Thou dost foresee from morning light
Our every deed, until the night.
Justice and judgment dwell with Thee,
Whatever is, Thine eye doth see:
Thou know'st what human hearts conceive
And none Thy wisdom may deceive. |