Her hands are cold; her face is white;
No more her pulses come and go;
Her eyes are shut to life and light;—
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
And lay her where the violets blow.
But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead for tears with alien eyes;
A slender cross of wood alone
Shall say, that here a maiden lies...
O love Divine, that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
On Thee we cast each earth-born care,
We smile at pain while Thou art near!
Though long the weary we tread,
And sorrow crown each lingering year,
No path we shun, no darkness dread,
Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
When drooping...
A crazy bookcase, placed before
A low-price dealer’s open door;
Therein arrayed in broken rows
A ragged crew of rhyme and prose,
The homeless vagrants, waifs, and strays
Whose low estate this line betrays
(Set forth the lesser birds to lime)
YOUR CHOICE AMONG THESE BOOKS 1 DIME!
Ho! dealer; for its motto’s sake
This...
If all the trees in all the woods were men;
And each and every blade of grass a pen;
If every leaf on every shrub and tree
Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes
Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
The human race should write, and write,...
Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong
The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song;
Full well I know the strong heroic line
Has lost its fashion since I made it mine;
But there are tricks old singers will not learn,
And this grave measure still must serve my turn.
So the old bird resumes the selfsame note
His first young summer...
As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying
From some far orb I track our watery sphere,
Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying,
The silvered globule seems a glistening tear.
But Nature lends her mirror of illusion
To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes,
And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion
The wintry...
From “Poems of the Class of ’Twenty-nine”
[Harvard]
COME, dear old comrade, you and I
Will steal an hour from days gone by,—
The shining days when life was new,
And all was bright as morning dew,—
The lusty days of long ago,
When you were Bill and I was Joe.
Your name may flaunt a titled trail,
Proud as a cockerel’s...
From “Poems of the Class of ’Twenty-nine”
[Harvard]
HAS there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise.
Hang the Almanac’s cheat and the Catalogue’s spite!
Old Time is a liar! We ’re twenty to-night!
We ’re twenty! We ’re twenty! Who says we are more?
He ’s tipsy,—young jackanapes!—show...
O For one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I ’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the spoils of wrinkled age!
Away with learning’s crown!
Tear out life’s wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’...
We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,
But o’er their silent sister’s breast
The wild-flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them:—
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
Nay grieve not for the...
