We stood by the window and hearkened
To the voice of the runnels sea-driven,
While, northward, the mountain-heads darkened,
Girt round with the clamours of heaven.
One peak with the storm at his portal
Loomed out to the left of his brothers:
Sustained, and sublime, and immortal,
A king, and the lord of the others!
Beneath him a cry from the surges
Rang shrill, like a clarion calling;
And about him, the wind of the gorges
Went falling, and rising, and falling.
But I, as the roofs of the thunder
Were cloven with manifold fires,
Turned back from the wail and the wonder,
And dreamed of old days and desires.
A song that was made, I remembered
A song that was made in the gloaming
Of suns which are sunken and numbered
With times that my heart hath no h...

Hearts that are great beat never loud,
They muffle their music when they come;
They hurry away from the thronging crowd
With bended brows and lips half dumb,

And the world looks on and mutters -- "Proud."
But when great hearts have passed away
Men gather in awe and kiss their shroud,
And in love they kneel around their clay.

Hearts that are great are always lone,
They never will manifest their best;
Their greatest greatness is unknown --
Earth knows a little -- God, the rest.

A Broken rainbow on the skies of May,
Touching the dripping roses and low clouds,
And in wet clouds its scattered glories lost:
So in the sorrow of her soul the ghost
Of one great love, of iridescent ray,
Spanning the roses dim of memory,
Against the tumult of life's rushing crowds
A broken rainbow on the skies of May.
A flashing humming-bird among the flowers,
Deep-coloured blooms; its slender tongue and bill
Sucking the syrups and the calyxed myrrhs,
Till, being full of sweets, away it whirrs:
Such was his love that won her heart's rich bowers
To give to him their all, their honied showers,
The bloom from which he drank his body's fill
A flashing humming-bird among the flowers.
A moon, moth-white, that through long mists of fleece
Moves amber-girt into ...

I saw an aged man upon his bier,
His hair was thin and white, and on his brow
A record of the cares of many a year;
Cares that were ended and forgotten now.
And there was sadness round, and faces bowed,
And woman's tears fell fast, and children wailed aloud.

Then rose another hoary man and said,
In faltering accents, to that weeping train,
"Why mourn ye that our aged friend is dead?
Ye are not sad to see the gathered grain,
Nor when their mellow fruit the orchards cast,
Nor when the yellow woods shake down the ripened mast.

"Ye sigh not when the sun, his course fulfilled,
His glorious course, rejoicing earth and sky,
In the soft evening, when the winds are stilled,
Sinks where his islands of refreshment lie,
And leaves the smile of his departure, s...

A track of moonlight on a quiet lake,
Whose small waves on a silver-sanded shore
Whisper of peace, and with the low winds make
Such harmonies as keep the woods awake,
And listening all night long for their sweet sake
A green-waved slope of meadow, hovered o'er
By angel-troops of lilies, swaying light
On viewless stems, with folded wings of white;
A slumberous stretch of mountain-land, far seen
Where the low westering day, with gold and green,
Purple and amber, softly blended, fills
The wooded vales, and melts among the hills;
A vine-fringed river, winding to its rest
On the calm bosom of a stormless sea,
Bearing alike upon its placid breast,
With earthly flowers and heavenly' stars impressed,
The hues of time and of eternity
Such are the pictures which th...

Though Summer walks the world to-day
With corn-crowned hours for her guard,
Her thoughts have clad themselves in gray,
And wait in Autumn's weedy yard.

And where the larkspur and the phlox
Spread carpets wheresoe'er she pass,
She seems to stand with sombre locks
Bound bleak with fog-washed zinnias. -

Fall's terra-cotta-colored flowers,
Whose disks the trickling wet has tinged
With dingy lustre when the bower's
Thin, flame-flecked leaves the frost has singed;

Or with slow feet, 'mid gaunt gold blooms
Of marigolds her fingers twist,
She seems to pass with Fall's perfumes,
And dreams of sullen rain and mist.

The day is done, and the darkness
    Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
    From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
    Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
    That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
    That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
    As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
    Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
    And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
    Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
    Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
    The...

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

There is an unhurried resemblance to pain, here,
this Fiddler on the Roof commodity, potables, fine oaken chest
for one and furs; but wait,
the Czarist police are busting up the place    -
a program is having its desired effect
on our emotions, the wine cellar smashed
as tears are falling like bloody heaps
in the red snow, cuttersleds
carting off the sundry feelings
we've invested in, a relationship
already staledated two years old.

Beloved! your hair was golden
As tender tints of sunrise,
As corn beside the River
    In softly varying hues.
I loved you for your slightness,
Your melancholy sweetness,
Your changeful eyes, that promised
    What your lips would still refuse.

You came to me, and loved me,
Were mine upon the River,
The azure water saw us
    And the blue transparent sky;
The Lotus flowers knew it,
Our happiness together,
While life was only River,
    Only love, and you and I.

Love wakened on the River,
To sounds of running water,
With silver Stars for witness
    And reflected Stars for light;
Awakened to existence,
With ripples for first music
And sunlight on the River
    For earliest sense of sight.

Love grew upon ...

And live I still to see relations gone,
And yet survive to sound this wailing tone;
Ah, woe is me, to write thy Funeral Song,
Who might in reason yet have lived long,
I saw the branches lopt the Tree now fall,
I stood so nigh, it crusht me down withal;
My bruised heart lies sobbing at the Root,
That thou dear Son hath lost both Tree and fruit:
Thou then on Seas sailing to forreign Coast;
Was ignorant what riches thou hadst lost.
But ah too soon those heavy tydings fly,
To strike thee with amazing misery;
Oh how I simpathize with thy sad heart,
And in thy griefs still bear a second part:
I lost a daughter dear, but thou a wife,
Who lov'd thee more (it seem'd) then her own life.
Thou being gone, she longer could not be,
Because her Soul she'd sent along wit...

I have not wept for Edgar, as a mother
    Weeps for the tender lamb she lays to rest;
And yet it cannot be that any other
    Baby like him shall lie upon my breast;
For he was with us but a passing guest,
A birdling that belonged not to the nest.

Looking upon his large dark eyes so tender,
    Filled with the solemn light of Paradise,
I knew that word would soon come to surrender,
    My babe, not mine, but native to the skies;
As the sweet lark that ever upward flies,
He would be taken from my longing eyes.

For from the first he looked to be earth-weary,
    And clung to me with no desire to play;
He never laughed and crowed with spirit cheery
    Like my earth babies; but from day to day
Seemed ever yearning for the far-away,
And well I kn...

Mia benigna fortuna e 'l viver lieto.

IN HIS MISERY HE DESIRES DEATH THE MORE HE REMEMBERS HIS PAST CONTENTMENT AND COMFORT.


    My favouring fortune and my life of joy,
My days so cloudless, and my tranquil nights,
The tender sigh, the pleasing power of song,
Which gently wont to sound in verse and rhyme,
Suddenly darken'd into grief and tears,
Make me hate life and inly pray for death!

O cruel, grim, inexorable Death!
How hast thou dried my every source of joy,
And left me to drag on a life of tears,
Through darkling days and melancholy nights.
My heavy sighs no longer meet in rhyme,
And my hard martyrdom exceeds all song!

Where now is vanish'd my once amorous song?
To talk of anger and to treat with death;
Where the fond...

Once through an autumn wood
I roamed in tearful mood,
By grief dismayed, doubting, and ill at ease;
When from a leafless oak,
Methought low murmurs broke,
Complaining accents, as of words like these:

"Incline thy mighty ear
Great Mother Earth, and hear
How I, thy child, am sorely vexed and tossed;
No one to heed my moan,
I shudder here, alone
With my destroyers, wind and snow, and frost.

Then low and unaware
This answer cleaved the air,
This tender answer, "Doubting one be still;
Oh trust to me, and know
The wind, the frost, the snow,
Are but my servants sent to do my will.

"For the destroyer frost,
His labor is not lost,
Rid thee he shall of many noisome things;
And thou shalt praise the snow
When drinking far b...

The sky is swollen with tears and melancholy.
Only far off, where its foul vapors burst,
Green glow pours down.    The houses,
Gray grimaces, are fiendishly bloated with mist.

Yellowish lights are beginning to gleam.
A stout father with wife and children dozes.
Painted women are practicing their dances.
Grotesque mimes strut towards the theater.

Jokers shriek, foul connoisseurs of men:
The day is dead... and a name remains!
Powerful men gleam in girls' eyes.
A woman yearns for her beloved woman.

He sat by me in school. His face is now
Vividly in my mind, as if he went
From me but yesterday - its pleasant smile
And the rich, joyous laughter of his eye,
And the free play of his unhaughty lip,
So redolent of his heart! He was not fair,
Nor singular, nor over-fond of books,
And never melancholy when alone.
He was the heartiest in the ring, the last
Home from the summer's wanderings, and the first
Over the threshold when the school was done.
All of us loved him. We shall speak his name
In the far years to come, and think of him
When we have lost life's simplest passages,
And pray for him - forgetting he is dead -
Life was in him so passing beautiful!

His childhood had been wasted in the close
And airless city. He had never thought
That the ...

    Children of Fate, in the same breath
    Created were they, Love and Death.
    Such fair creations ne'er were seen,
    Or here below, or in the heaven serene.
    The first, the source of happiness,
    The fount whence flows the greatest bliss
    That in the sea of being e'er is found;
    The last each sorrow gently lulls,
    Each harsh decree of Fate annuls.
    Fair child with beauty crowned,
    Sweet to behold, not such
    As cowards paint her in their fright,
    She in young Love's companionship
    Doth often take delight,
    As they o'er mortal paths together fly,
    Chief comforters of every loyal heart.
    Nor ever is the heart more wise
    Than when Love smites it, nor defies
    More scornfully life's misery,
    And f...

Paupertas onus visa est grave.


Cold blows the wind, and while the tear
Bursts trembling from my swollen eyes,
The rain's big drop, quick meets it there,
And on my naked bosom flies!
O pity, all ye sons of Joy,
The little wand'ring Negro-boy.

These tatter'd clothes, this ice-cold breast
By Winter harden'd into steel,
These eyes, that know not soothing rest,
But speak the half of what I feel!
Long, long, I never new one joy,
The little wand'ring Negro-boy!

Cannot the sigh of early grief
Move but one charitable mind?
Cannot one hand afford relief?
One Christian pity, and be kind?
Weep, weep, for thine was never joy,
O little wand'ring Negro-boy!

Is there a good which men call Pleasure?
O Ozmyn, would that it were ...