Masks
black tragedy lets slip her grim disguise
And shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes;
But when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears,
How wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!
MEMORIES
TWO things there are with Memory will abide,
Whatever else befall, while life flows by:
That soft cold hand-touch at the altar side;
...
Time
time has no flight—’t is we who speed along;
The days and nights are but the same as when
The earth awoke with the first rush of song,
And felt the swiftly passing feet of men.
INFALLIBILITY
“BELIEVE in me,” the Prophet cried,—
“I hold the key of life and light:”
And, lo, one touched him, and he died
...
The bubble
why should I stay? Nor seed nor fruit have I.
But, sprung at once to beauty’s perfect round,
Nor loss, nor gain, nor change in me is found,—
A life—complete in death—complete to die.
BECALMED
THE BAR is crossed; but Death—the pilot—stands
In seeming doubt before the tranquil deep;
The fathom-line still trembling...
The soul IN THE BODY
WHAT if the Soul her real life elsewhere holds,
Her faint reflex Time’s darkling stream enfolds,
And thou and I, though seeming dwellers here,
Live some where yonder in the starlit sphere?
INSOMNIA
A HOUSE of sleepers—I, alone unblest,
Am yet awake and empty vigil keep.
When these, who spend life’s day with...
Moonlight song OF THE MOCKING-BIRD
EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.
NIGHT MISTS
SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature’s dreams....
The bedouins OF THE SKIES
YON clouds that roam the deserts of the air,
On wind-swift barbs, o’er many an azure plain,
Scarce pause to lift to Allah one small prayer,
Ere Ishmael’s spirit drives them forth again.
THE TWO SPIRITS
I DREAMED two spirits came—one dusk as night:
“Mortals miscall me Life,” he sadly saith;
The other...
A quatrain
hark at the lips of this pink whorl of shell
And you shall hear the ocean’s surge and roar:
So in the quatrain’s measure, written well,
A thousand lines shall all be sung in four!
A HOLLYHOCK
SERAGLIO of the Sultan Bee!
I listen at the waxen door,
And hear the zithern’s melody
And sound...
The wind IN THE PINES
WHEN winds go organing through the pines
On hill and headland, darkly gleaming,
Meseems I hear sonorous lines
Of Iliads that the woods are dreaming.
OPPORTUNITY
BEHOLD a hag whom Life denies a kiss
As he rides questward in knight-errant-wise;
Only when he hath passed her is it his
To know, too late,...
Mount Rainier
long hours we toiled up through the solemn wood
Beneath moss-banners stretched from tree to tree;
At last upon a barren hill we stood
And, lo, above loomed Majesty!
ALONG SHORE
WHAT wondrous sermons these seas preach to men!
What lofty pinnacles they seek to climb!
How old and bent they are, yet strong as when...
A Diamond
look how it sparkles, see it greet
With laughing light the ambient air;
One little drop of sunshine sweet
Held in eternal bondage there.
SPRING
A WHISPER on the heath I hear,
And blossoms deck the waking wood;
Ah! surely now the virgin year
Is in her blushing maidenhood.
MARCH
WHITHER...
