Tell me what sail the seas
Under the stars?
Ships, and ships’ companies,
Off to the wars.
Steel are the ship’s great sides,
Steel are her guns,
Backward she thrusts the tides,
Swiftly she runs;
Steel is the sailor’s heart,
Stalwart his arm,
His the Republic’s part
Through cloud and storm....
No freeman, saith the wise, thinks much on death:
No man with soul he dareth call his own
Liveth in dread lest there be no atone
In time to come for yesterday’s warm breath,
No more than he for such and hungereth
As falls to those who speed their souls a-groan;
Death may be King, to sit a tottering throne
And hale men hence—let cowards...
Of old, a man who died
Had, in his pride,
Woman and steed and slave
Heaped at his grave;
Given this sudden end
Their souls to send,
Still serving, witherward
Their lord had fared.
Grown wiser, we, to-day,
A happier way
Find for our love and grief
And death’s relief:
Flowers their fragrance strew...
Thou dancer of two thousand years,
Thou dancer of to-day,
What silent music fills thine ears,
What Bacchic lay,
That thou shouldst dance the centuries
Down their forgotten way?
What mystic strain of pagan mirth
Has charmed eternally
Those lithe, strong limbs, that spurn the earth?
What melody,
Unheard...
She dreams of Love upon the temple stair,—
About her feet the lithe green lizards play
In all the drowsy, warm, Sicilian air.
The winds have loosed the fillet from her hair,
Sea winds, salt-lipped, that laugh and seem to say,
“She dreams of Love, upon the temple stair.
“Then let us twine soft fingers, here and there,
Amid the...
On an olive-crested steep
Hanging o’er the dusty road,
Lieth in his last abode,
Wrapped in everlasting sleep,
He who in the days of yore
Sang of pastures, sang of farms,
Sang of heroes and their arms,
Sang of passion, sang of war.
When the lark at dawning tells,
Herald like, the coming day,
And...
A noisette on my garden path
An ever-swaying shadow throws;
But if I pluck it strolling by,
I pluck the shadow with the rose.
Just near enough my heart you stood
To shadow it,—but was it fair
In him, who plucked and bore you off,
To leave your shadow lingering there?
Slow, groping giant, whose unsteady limbs
Waver and bend and cannot keep the path,
Thy feet are foul with mire, and thy knees
Torn by the nettles of the wayside fen;
The dust of dogmas dead is in thy mouth,
Yet down the ages thou hast followed him—
Clear-eyed Belief—who journeys with light heart.
The leaves of Hope about his head are...
Broncho dan halts midway of the stream,
Sucking up the water that goes tugging at his knees;
High noon and dry noon,—to-day it doesn’t seem
As if the country ever knew the blessing of a breeze.
A torn felt hat with the brim cockled up,
A dip form the saddle—there you are—
It ’s the brew of old Snake River in a cowboy’s drinking-cup—...
The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me;
I count them over, every one apart,
My rosary.
Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,
To still a heart in absence wrung;
I tell each bead unto the end and there
A cross is hung.
Oh memories that bless—and burn!
Oh...
