From some sweet home, the morning train
Brings to the city,
Five days a week, in sun or rain,
Returning like a song’s refrain,
A school girl pretty.
A wild flower’s unaffected grace
Is dainty miss’s;
Yet in her shy, expressive face
The touch of urban arts I trace,—
And artifices.
No one...
Prime cantante!
Scherzo! Andante!
Piano, pianissimo!
Presto, prestissimo!
Hark! are there nine birds or ninety and nine?
And now a miraculous gurgling gushes
Like nectar from Hebe’s Olympian bottle,
The laughter of tune from a rapturous throttle!
Such melody must be a hermit-thrush’s!
But that other caroler, nearer,...
In hades
then saw I, with gray eyes fulfilled of rest,
And lulling voice, a woman sweet, and she,—
“Bear thou my word: I am of all most blest;
Nor marvel that I am Eurydice.
I stood and watched those slow feet go from me
Farther and farther; in the light afar,
All clear the figure grew—then suddenly
Into my dark his face flashed...
Under the slanting light of the yellow sun of October,
A “gang of Dagos” were working close by the side of the car track.
Pausing a moment to catch a note of their liquid Italian,
Faintly I heard an echo of Rome’s imperial accents,
Broken-down forms of Latin words from the Senate and Forum,
Now smoothed over by use to the musical lingua Romana.
...
To me the earth once seemed to be
Most beautiful and fair;
All living creatures were to me,
In wood or air,
But kindred of a freer class;
I thrilled with keenest joy
To find the young quail in the grass:—
I was a boy.
The robin in the apple-tree,
The brown thrush in the wood,
The meadow larks...
How long it seems since that mild April night,
When, leaning from the window, you and I
Heard, clearly ringing from the shadowy bight,
The loon’s unearthly cry!
Southwest the wind blew, million little waves
Ran rippling round the point in mellow tune,
But mournful, like the voice of one who raves,
That laughter of the loon!...
Across the narrow beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I,
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,—
One little sandpiper and I.
Above our heads the sullen clouds...
We sail toward evening’s lonely star
That trembles in the tender blue;
One single cloud, a dusky bar,
Burnt with dull carmine through and through,
Slow smouldering in the summer sky,
Lies low along the fading west.
How sweet to watch its splendors die,
Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed!
The soft breeze freshens, leaps...
Warm, wild, rainy wind, blowing fitfully,
Stirring dreamy breakers on the slumberous May sea,
What shall fail to answer thee? What thing shall withstand
The spell of thine enchantment, flowing over sea and land?
All along the swamp-edge in the rain I go;
All about my head thou the loosened locks dost blow;
Like the German goose-girl in the...
He loves not well whose love is bold!
I would not have thee come too nigh:
The sun’s gold would not seem pure gold
Unless the sun were in the sky;
To take him thence and chain him near
Would make his beauty disappear.
He keeps his state,—keep thou in thine,
And shine upon me from afar!
So shall I bask in light divine,...
