I.
a Baby’s feet, like sea-shells pink,
  Might tempt, should Heaven see meet,
An angel’s lips to kiss, we think,
    A baby’s feet.

Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat
  They stretch and spread and wink
Their ten soft buds that...

Beneath the shadow of dawn’s aerial cope,
With eyes enkindled as the sun’s own sphere,
Hope from the front of youth in godlike cheer
Looks Godward, past the shades where blind men grope
Round the dark door that prayers nor dreams can ope,
And makes for joy...

If love were what the rose is,
  And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
  Green pleasure or gray grief;
If love were what the rose is,
  And I were like the leaf...

Kissing her hair, I sat against her feet:
Wove and unwove it,—wound, and found it sweet:
Made fast therewith her hands, drew down her eyes,
Deep as deep flowers, and dreamy like dim skies;
With her own tresses bound, and found her fair,—
      Kissing her...

Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore is,
  Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy,
As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region of stories,
  Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a...

When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
  The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the...

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
  At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
  The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
  The steep, square slope...

Back to the flower-town, side by side,
    The bright months bring,
New-born, the bridegroom and the bride,
    Freedom and spring.

The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
    Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free;...

  CHIEF in thy generation born of men
Whom English praise acclaimed as English born,
With eyes that matched the world-wide eyes of morn
For gleam of tears or laughter, tenderest then
When thoughts of children warmed their light, or when
Reverence of age...

Two souls diverse out of our human sight
Pass, followed one with love and each with wonder:
The stormy sophist with his mouth of thunder,
Clothed with loud words and mantled in the might
Of darkness and magnificence of night;
And one whose eye could smite...