we are ghost-ridden:
Through the deep night
Wanders a spirit,
Noiseless and white;
Loiters not, lingers not, knoweth not rest,
Ceaselessly haunting the East and the West.
She, whose undoing the ages have wrought,
Moves on to the time of God’s rhythmical thought.
In the dark, swinging sea,
As...
Come, on thy swaying feet,
Wild Spirit of the Fall!
With wind-blown skirts, loose hair of russet-brown,
Crowned with bright berries of the bitter-sweet.
Trip a light measure with the hurrying leaf,
Straining thy few late roses to thy breast,
With laughter over-gay, sweet eyes drooped down,
That none may guess thy grief.
Dare not...
Oh, it ’s twenty gallant gentlemen
Rode out to hunt the deer,
With mirth upon the silver horn
And gleam upon the spear;
They galloped through the meadow-grass,
They sought the forest’s gloom,
And loudest rang Sir Moven’s laugh,
And lightest tost his plume,
There ’s no delight by day or night
Like hunting...
Climbing up the hillside beneath the summer stars
I listen to the murmur of the drowsy ebbing sea;
The newly-risen moon has loosed her silver zone
On the undulating waters where the ships are sailing free.
O moon, and O stars, and O drowsy summer sea.
Drawing thy tide from the city up the bay,
I know how you will look and what your bounds...
Honest stradivari made men:
With the gift of love he blest me;
Once, delight, a master played me,
Love awoke when he caressed me!
Oh the deep, ecstatic burning!
Oh the secrets low and tender!
Oh the passion and the yearning
At our love’s complete surrender!
Heartless men, so long to hide me
With the costly toys you...
“now since mine even is come at last,—
For I have been the sport of steel,
And hot life ebbeth from me fast,
And I in saddle roll and reel,—
Come bind me, bind me on my steed!
Of fingering leech I have no need!”
The chaplain clasped his mailëd knee.
“Nor need I more thy whine and thee!
No time is left my sins to tell;
But...
“not ye who have stoned, not ye who have smitten us,” cry
The sad, great souls, as they go out hence into dark,—
“Not ye we accuse, though for you was our passion borne;
And ye we reproach not, who silently passed us by.
We forgive blind eyes and the ears that would not hark,
The careless and causeless hate and the shallow scorn.
“But ye...
The garden within was shaded,
And guarded about from sight;
The fragrance flowed to the south wind,
The fountain leaped to the light.
And the street without was narrow,
And dusty, and hot, and mean;
But the bush that bore white roses,
She leaned to the fence between:
And softly she sought a crevice
In that...
He loved her, having felt his love begin
With that first look,—as lover oft avers.
He made pale flowers his pleading ministers,
Impressed sweet music, drew the springtime in
To serve his suit; but when he could not win,
Forgot her face and those gray eyes of hers;
And at her name his pulse no longer stirs,
And life goes on as though she...
So, the powder ’s low, and the larder ’s clean,
And surrender drapes, with its blacks impending,
All the stage for a sorry and sullen scene:
Yet indulge me my whim of a madcap ending!
Let us once more fill, ere the final chill,
Every vein with the glow of the rich canary!
Since the sweet hot liquor of life ’s to spill,
Of the...
