Inaudible move day and night,
And noiseless grows the flower;
Silent are pulsing wings of light,
And voiceless fleets the hour.
The moon utters no word when she
Walks through the heavens bare;
The stars forever silent flee,
And songless gleam through air.
The deepest love is voiceless too;
Heart sorrow makes...
O woman, let thy heart not cleave
To any poet’s soul;
For he the muse will never leave,
But follow to life’s goal.
Then trust him not, he is not thine,
Whate’er he seems to be;
Strong unseen tendrils round him twine,
And keep him still from thee.
His words with passion are athrill,
And bear contagious fire;...
Nature and THE CHILD
FOR many blessings I to God upraise
A thankful heart; the life He gives is fair
And sweet and good, since He is everywhere,
Still with me even in the darkest ways.
But most I thank Him for my earliest days,
Passed in the fields and in the open air,
With flocks and birds and flowers, free from all care,
And glad...
Beneath the Memnonian shadows of Memphis, it rose from the slime,
A reed of the river, self-hid, as though shunning the curse of its crime,
And it shook as it measured in whispers the lapses of tide and of time.
It shuddered, it stooped, and was dumb, when the kings of the earth passed along.
For what could this reed of the river in the race of the swift and...
One calm and cloudless winter night,
Under a moonless sky,
Whence I had seen the gracious light
Of sunset fade and die,
I stood alone a little space,
Where tree nor building bars
Its outlook, in a desert place,
The best to see the stars.
No sound was in the frosty air,
No light below the skies;
I looked...
The spring came earlier on
Than usual that year;
The shadiest snow was gone,
The slowest brook was clear,
And warming in the sun
Shy flowers began to peer.
’T was more like middle May,
The earth so seemed to thrive,
That Nineteenth April day
Of Seventeen Seventy-five;
Winter was well a way,
New England...
O steadfast trees that know
Rain, hail, and sleet, and snow,
And all the winds that blow;
But when spring comes, can then
So freshly bud again
Forgetful of the wrong!
Waters that deep below
The stubborn ice can go
With quiet underflow,
Contented to be dumb
Till spring herself shall come
To listen...
As the insect from the rock
Takes the color of its wing;
As the boulder from the shock
Of the ocean’s rhythmic swing
Makes itself a perfect form,
Learns a calmer front to raise;
As the shell, enamelled warm
With the prism’s mystic rays,
Praises wind and wave that make
All its chambers fair and strong;
As...
The golden-robin came to build his nest
High in the elm-tree’s ever-nodding crest;
All the long day, upon his task intent,
Backward and forward busily he went,
Gathering from far and near the tiny shreds
That birdies weave for little birdies’ beds;
Now bits of grass, now bits of vagrant string,
And now some queerer, dearer sort of thing...
When souls that have put off their mortal gear
Stand in the pure, sweet light of heaven’s day,
And wondering deeply what to do or say,
And trembling more with rapture than with fear,
Desire some token of their friends most dear,
Who there some time have made their happy stay,
And much have longed for them to come that way,
What shall it...
