• Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave!
      When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then?
    To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave,
      The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men?

    Not Milton’s keen, translunar music thine;
      Not Shakespeare’s cloudless, boundless human view;
    Not Shelley’s flush of rose on peaks divine;
      Nor...

  • (6th October, 1892)
    LOW, like another’s, lies the laurelled head:
    The life that seemed a perfect song is o’er:
    Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
    Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
    Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
    Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild seashore,
    Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,...

  • From “The Purple East”
    WHAT profits it, O England, to prevail
      In camp and mart and council, and bestrew
      With argosies thy oceans, and renew
    With tribute levied on each golden gale
    Thy treasuries, if thou canst hear the wail
      Of women martyred by the turbaned crew,
      Whose tenderest mercy was the sword that slew,
    And lift no...

  • She stands, a thousand-wintered tree,
      By countless morns impearled;
    Her broad roots coil beneath the sea,
      Her branches sweep the world;
    Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed,
      Clothe the remotest strand
    With forests from her scatterings made,
    New nations fostered in her shade,
      And linking land with land.

    O ye by...