Across the sombre prairie sea
The dark swells billow heavily.
Are the looming ridges near of far
That heave to the smooth horizon-bar?
The russet reach of grassy roll
Sickens the heart and numbs the soul;
The thin wind gives no air for breath;
The stillness is the pause of death.
This width was never shaped to be
The...
From “Evangeline”
BEAUTIFUL was the night. Behind the black wall of the forest,
Tipping its summit with silver, arose the moon. On the river
Fell here and there through the branches a tremulous gleam of the moonlight,
Like the sweet thoughts of love on a darkened and devious spirit.
Nearer and round about her, the manifold flowers of the garden
...
Pike County Ballads
WALL, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,
Because he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he ’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He weren’t no...
The loveliness of Nature, always did
Delight me.
In the days of childhood; when
My young light heart, in all the buoyancy
Of its own bright imagination’s spell,
Beat in accordant consonance to all
For which it cherished an affinity;
The summer glory of the landscape, rous’d
...
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
