Thou who, when fears attack,
Bid’st them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman’s back
Perching, unseatest;
Sweet when the morn is gray;
Sweet, when they ’ve cleared away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest:
I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told,
Not...
YOU 1 see this pebble-stone? It ’s a thing I bought
Of a bit of a chit of a boy i’ the mid o’ the day—
I like to dock the smaller parts-o’-speech,
As we curtail the already cur-tailed cur
(You catch the paronomasia, play o’ words?)—
Did, rather, i’ the pre-Landseerian days.
Well, to my muttons. I purchased the concern,
And clapt it i’...
The AULD 1 wife sat at her ivied door,
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
A thing she had frequently done before;
And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees.
The piper he piped on the hill-top high,
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
Till the cow said “I die” and the goose asked “Why;”
And the dog said nothing but...
IN 1 moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter
(And heaven it knoweth what that may mean;
Meaning, however, is no great matter)
Where woods are a-tremble, with rifts atween;
Through God’s own heather we wonned together,
I and my Willie (O love my love):
I need hardly remark it was glorious weather,
And flitterbats waved alow...
ON, on, my brown Arab, away, away!
Thou hast trotted o’er many a mile to-day,
And I trow right meagre hath been thy fare
Since they roused thee at dawn from thy straw-piled lair,
To tread with those echoless, unshod feet
Yon weltering flats in the noontide heat,
Where no palm-tree proffers a kindly shade,
And the eye never rests on a...
Forever! ’t is a single word!
Our rude forefathers deemed it two;
Can you imagine so absurd
A view?
Forever! What abysms of woe
The word reveals, what frenzy, what
Despair! For ever (printed so)
Did not.
It looks, ah me! how trite and tame;
It fails to sadden or appall
Or solace—it is...
She laid it where the sunbeams fall
Unscanned upon the broken wall.
Without a tear, without a groan,
She laid it near a mighty stone,
Which some rude swain had haply cast
Thither in sport, long ages past,
And time with mosses had o’erlaid,
And fenced with many a tall grass-blade,
And all about bid roses bloom
And violets...
’t Was ever thus from childhood’s hour
My fondest hopes would not decay:
I never loved a tree or flower
Which was the first to fade away!
The garden, where I used to delve
Short-frocked, still yields me pinks in plenty;
The pear-tree that I climbed at twelve,
I see still blossoming, at twenty.
I never nursed a dear...
I Watched her as she stooped to pluck
A wild flower in her hair to twine;
And wished that it had been my luck
To call her mine;
Anon I heard her rate with mad,
Mad words her babe within its cot,
And felt particularly glad
That it had not.
I knew (such subtle brains have men!)
That she was uttering...
