James Herbert Morse

  • There are some quiet ways—
      Ay, not a few—
    Where the affections grow,
      And noble days
      Distil a gentle praise
      That, as cool dew,
      Or aromatic gums
      Within a bower,
      In after-times becomes
      A calm, perennial dower....

  • “now half a hundred years had I been born—
    So many and so brief—when made aware,
    By Time’s blunt looks, of hoar-frost in my hair.
    I turned to one of twenty, in the corn,
    At husking time, that blissful autumn morn,
    And said, ‘What if the red ear fall to me...

  • The wild geese, flying in the night, behold
    Our sunken towns lie underneath a sea,
    Which buoys them on its billows. Liberty
    They have, but such as those frail barques of old
    That crossed unsounded mains to search our wold.
    To them the night unspeakable is...

  •   brook, would thou couldst flow
    With a music all thine own—
    Thy babble of music alone—
    Not a word of the Long Ago
    In thy brawling down below,
    Not a sigh of the wind by thee,
    The wind in the willow tree!

    Or, Brook, if thou couldst go,...

  • Come, silence, thou sweet reasoner,
    Lay thy soft hand on all that stir—
    On grass and shrub and tree and flower,
    And let this be thine own dear hour.

    No more across the neighbor rill
    To that lone cottage on the hill
    Shall wonder with her questions...