From “Love’s Labor ’s Lost,” Act V. Sc. 2.
WHEN icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whoo;
To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note,
While...
From the German by Charles Timothy Brooks
A Song to Be Sung behind the Stove
OLD Winter is the man for me—
Stout-hearted, sound, and steady;
Steel nerves and bones of brass hath he:
Come snow, come blow, he ’s ready!
If ever man was well, ’t is he;
He keeps no fire in his chamber,
And yet from cold and cough is free...
How small a tooth hath mined the season’s heart!
How cold a touch hath set the wood on fire,
Until it blazes like a costly pyre
Built for some Ganges emperor, old and swart,
Soul-sped on clouds of incense! Whose the art
That webs the streams, each morn, with silver wire,
Delicate as the tension of a lyre,—
Whose falchion pries the...
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the...
When the feud of hot and cold
Leaves the autumn woodlands bare;
When the year is getting old,
And flowers are dead, and keen the air;
When the crow has new concern,
And early sounds his raucous note;
And—where the late witch-hazels burn—
The squirrel from a chuckling throat
Tells that one larder’s space is...
Whenever a snow-flake leaves the sky,
It turns and turns to say “Good-bye!
Good-bye, dear clouds, so cool and gray!”
Then lightly travels on its way.
And when a snow-flake finds a tree,
“Good-day!” it says—“Good-day to thee!
Thou art so bare, and lonely, dear,
I ’ll rest and call my comrades here.”
But when a snow-flake, brave...
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight; the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the...
The Great soft downy snow-storm like a cloak
Descends to wrap the lean world head to feet;
It gives the dead another winding-sheet,
It buries all the roofs until the smoke
Seems like a soul that from its clay has broke.
It broods moon-like upon the Autumn wheat,
And visits all the trees in their retreat
To hood and mantle that poor...
Stand here by my side and turn, I pray,
On the lake below thy gentle eyes;
The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray,
And dark and silent the water lies;
And out of that frozen mist the snow
In wavering flakes begins to flow;
Flake after flake
They sink in the dark and silent lake.
See how in a living swarm...
Softer than silence, stiller than still air
Float down from high pine-boughs the slender leaves.
The forest floor its annual boon receives
That comes like snowfall, tireless, tranquil, fair.
Gently they glide, gently they clothe the bare
Old rocks with grace. Their fall a mantle weaves
Of paler yellow than autumnal sheaves
Or those...
