Far poured past Broadway’s lamps alight,
  The tumult of her motley throng,
When high and clear upon the night
  Rose an inspiring song,
And rang above the city’s din
To sound of harp and violin;
  A simple but a manly strain,
  And ending...

Ye smooth-faced sons of Jacob, hug close your ingleside;
Guard well the market in its wealth, the palace in its pride!
  Oh, blithe it is to wander, and the world is wide!

Hard straining at their cables, the captive vessels ride:
Haul up the prisoning anchor,...

What is a sonnet? ’T is the pearly shell
That murmurs of the far-off murmuring sea;
A precious jewel carved most curiously;
It is a little picture painted well.
What is a sonnet? ’T is the tear that fell
From a great poet’s hidden ecstasy;
A two-...

Scorn not the sonnet; critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoëns soothed an...

An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.

A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.

Say, in a hut of mean estate
  A light just glimmers and then is gone,
Nature is seen to hesitate,—
  Put forth and then retract her pawn;

Say, in the alembic of an eye
  Haughty is mixed with poor and low;
Say, Truth herself is not so high...

I said to Sorrow’s awful storm,
  That beat against my breast,
Rage on—thou may’st destroy this form,
  And lay it low at rest;
But still the spirit that now brooks
  Thy tempest, raging high,
Undaunted on its fury looks
  With steadfast...