Four things a man must learn to do
If he would make his record true:
To think without confusion clearly;
To love his fellow-men sincerely;
To act from honest motives purely;
To trust in God and Heaven securely.
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“read out the names!” and Burke sat back,
And Kelly drooped his head.
While Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal passers—all.
Then, knocking the ashes from out his pipe,... -
His tongue was touched with sacred fire,
He could not rest, he must speak out,
When Liberty lay stabbed, and doubt
Stalked through the night in vestments dire,—When slaves uplifted manacled hands,
Praying in agony and despair,
And answer came not anywhere,
But gloom through all the stricken lands,—His voice for...
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Each of us is like Balboa: once in all our lives do we,
Gazing from some tropic summit, look upon an unknown sea;But upon the dreary morrow, every way our footsteps seek,
Rank and tangled vine and jungle block our pathway to the peak. -
Weary, weary, desolate,
Sand-swept, parched, and cursed of fate;
Burning, but how passionless!
Barren, bald, and pitiless!Through all ages baleful moons
Glared upon thy whited dunes;And malignant, wrathful suns
Fiercely drank thy streamless runs;So that Nature’s only tune
Is the blare of the simoon,
... -
Silence was envious of the only voice
That mightier seemed than she. So, cloaked as Death,
With potion borrowed from Oblivion,
Yet with slow step and tear-averted look,
She sealed his lips, closed his extinguished eyes,
And, veiling him with darkness, deemed him dead.
But no!—There ’s something vital in the great
That blunts the edge of... -
as a bell in a chime
Sets its twin-note a-ringing,
As one poet’s rhyme
Wakes another to singing,
So, once she has smiled,
All your thoughts are beguiled,
And flowers and song from your childhood are bringing.Though moving through sorrow
As the star through the night,
She needs... -
What is there wanting in the Spring?
The air is soft as yesteryear;
The happy-nested green is here,
And half the world is on the wing.
The morning beckons, and like balm
Are westward waters blue and calm.
Yet something’s wanting in the Spring.What is it wanting in the Spring?
O April, lover to us all,
What... -
Here in the dark what ghostly figures press!—
No phantom of the Past, or grim or sad;
No wailing spirit of woe; no spectre, clad
In white and wandering cloud, whose dumb distress
Is that its crime it never may confess;
No shape from the strewn sea; nor they that add
The link of Life and Death,—the tearless mad,
That live nor die in dreary... -
This is the loggia Browning loved,
High on the flank of the friendly town;
These are the hills that his keen eye roved,
The green like a cataract leaping down
To the plain that his pen gave new renown.There to the West what a range of blue!—
The very background Titian drew
To his peerless Loves! O tranquil scene!
Who...