Do you remember, my sweet, absent son,
How in the soft June days forever done
You loved the heavens so warm and clear and high;
And, when I lifted you, soft came your cry,—
“Put me ’way up,—’way, ’way up in blue sky”?
I laughed and said I could not,—set you down,
Your gray eyes wonder-filled beneath that crown
Of bright hair gladdening me...
-
-
I
the sun had set;
The leaves with dew were wet:
Down fell a bloody dusk
On the woods, that second of May,
Where Stonewall’s corps, like a beast of prey,
Tore through, with angry tusk.“They’ve trapped us, boys!”
Rose from our flank a voice.
With a rush of steel and smoke
On came the rebels straight,
Eager... -
Despair
dear, when you see my grave,
Oh, shall you weep?
Ah, no! That were to have
Mistaken care;
But when you see my grave,
I pray you keep
Sunshine of heart that time doth lay me there,
Where veiling mists of dream guard endless sleep.
Though the young life we mourn
That, blooming, dies,—
Ere grief hath... -
Dear little Dorothy, she is no more!
I have wandered world-wide from shore to shore,
I have seen as great beauties as ever were wed;
But none can console me for Dorothy dead.Dear little Dorothy! How strange it seems
That her face is less real than the faces of dreams;
That the love which kept true, and the lips which so spoke,
Are more... -
Sorrow, my friend,
When shall you come again?
The wind is slow, and the bent willows send
Their silvery motions wearily down the plain.
The bird is dead
That sang this morning through the summer rain!Sorrow, my friend,
I owe my soul to you.
And if my life with any glory end
Of tenderness for others, and the words are... -
Eileen of four,
Eileen of smiles;
Eileen of five,
Eileen of tears;
Eileen of ten, of fifteen years,
Eileen of youth
And woman’s wiles;
Eileen of twenty,
In love’s land,
Eileen all tender
In her bliss,
Untouched by sorrow’s treacherous kiss,
And the sly weapon in life’s hand,—
Eileen aroused... -
if, when I kneel to pray,
With eager lips I say:
“Lord, give me all the things that I desire,—
Health, wealth, fame, friends, brave heart, religious fire,
The power to sway my fellow-men at will,
And strength for mighty works to banish ill,”—
In such a prayer as this
The blessing I must miss.Or if I only...
-
When i forth fare beyond this narrow earth,
With all its metes and bounds of now and here,
And brooding clouds of ignorance and fear
That overhung me on my day of birth,
Wherethrough the jocund sun’s perennial mirth
Has shone more inly bright each coming year
With some new glory of that outer sphere
Where length and breadth and height are... -
I wonder, dear, if you had been
The maiden queen’s pet maid of honor,
A flower of that fair time wherein
A court of roses smiled upon her,And I, erewhile, by Trojan wall
Had fiercely fought for Grecian glory,
Beheld the pride of Priam fall,
And home in Athens told the story,Whether we, wandering in the glow...
-
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
...