Come, silence, thou sweet reasoner,
Lay thy soft hand on all that stir—
On grass and shrub and tree and flower,
And let this be thine own dear hour.
No more across the neighbor rill
To that lone cottage on the hill
Shall wonder with her questions go,
Seeking if joy be there or no.
No longer shall the listening ear
Go...
brook, would thou couldst flow
With a music all thine own—
Thy babble of music alone—
Not a word of the Long Ago
In thy brawling down below,
Not a sigh of the wind by thee,
The wind in the willow tree!
Or, Brook, if thou couldst go,
As once, in the prime of May,
For a whole long holiday,
When the cowslips down...
The wild geese, flying in the night, behold
Our sunken towns lie underneath a sea,
Which buoys them on its billows. Liberty
They have, but such as those frail barques of old
That crossed unsounded mains to search our wold.
To them the night unspeakable is free;
They have the moon and stars for company;
To them no foe but the remorseless...
“now half a hundred years had I been born—
So many and so brief—when made aware,
By Time’s blunt looks, of hoar-frost in my hair.
I turned to one of twenty, in the corn,
At husking time, that blissful autumn morn,
And said, ‘What if the red ear fall to me?’
I would not for the world have any see
The look, half doubtful, mazeful, half in...
There are some quiet ways—
Ay, not a few—
Where the affections grow,
And noble days
Distil a gentle praise
That, as cool dew,
Or aromatic gums
Within a bower,
In after-times becomes
A calm, perennial dower.
There wayside bush and briar!
These lend a grace,
Flashing a glad assent...
