To you, whose temperate pulses flow
With measured beat, serene and slow,
The even tenor of whose way
Is undisturbed by passion’s sway,
This tale of wayward love may seem
The record of a fevered dream.
And yet, we two have that within
To make us what our kind have been.
A lure more strong, a wish more faint,
Makes one a...
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Her lips were so near
That—what else could I do?
You ’ll be angry, I fear,
But her lips were so near—
Well, I can’t make it clear,
Or explain it to you,
But—her lips were so near
That—what else could I do? -
When i was seventeen I heard
From each censorious tongue,
“I ’d not do that if I were you;
You see you ’re rather young.”Now that I number forty years,
I ’m quite as often told
Of this or that I should n’t do
Because I ’m quite too old.O carping world! If there ’s an age
Where youth and manhood keep... -
Put them in print?
Make one more dint
In the ages’ furrowed rock? No, no!
Let his name and his verses go.
These idle scraps, they would but wrong
His memory, whom we honored long,
And men would ask: “Is this the best—
Is this the whole his life expressed?”
Haply he had no care to tell
To all the thoughts which flung their... -
Thine old-world eyes—each one a violet
Big as the baby rose that is thy mouth—
Set me a-dreaming. Have our eyes not met
In childhood—in a garden of the South?Thy lips are trembling with a song of France,
...
My cousin, and thine eyes are dimly sweet;
’Wildered with reading in an old romance
All afternoon upon the garden seat. -
Mimi, do you remember—
Don’t get behind your fan—
That morning in September
On the cliffs of Grand Manan,
Where to the shock of Fundy
The topmost harebells sway
(Campanula rotundi-
folia: cf. Gray)?On the pastures high and level,
That overlook the sea,
Where I wondered what the devil
Those... -
The wilderness a secret keeps
Upon whose guess I go:
Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard;
And yet I know, I know,Some day the viewless latch will lift,
The door of air swing wide
To one lost chamber of the wood
Where those shy mysteries hide,—One yet unfound, receding depth,
From which the wood-thrush... -
He sang one song and died—no more but that:
A single song and carelessly complete.
He would not bind and thresh his chance-grown wheat,
Nor bring his wild fruit to the common vat,
To store the acid rinsings, thin and flat,
Squeezed from the press or trodden under feet.
A few slow beads, blood-red and honey-sweet,
Oozed from the grape,... -
Within me are two souls that pity each
The other for the ends they seek, yet smile
Forgiveness, as two friends that love the while
The folly against which each feigns to preach.And while one barters in the market-place,
Or drains the cup before the tavern fire,
The other, winged with a divine desire,
Searches the... -
My window is the open sky,
The flower in farthest wood is mine;
I am the heir to all gone by,
The eldest son of all the line.
And when the robbers Time and Death
Athwart my path conspiring stand,
I cheat them with a clod, a breath,
And pass the sword from hand to hand!