Autumn was cold in Plymouth town;
The wind ran round the shore,
Now softly passing up and down,
Now wild and fierce and fleet,
Wavering overhead,
Moaning in the narrow street
As one beside the dead.
The leaves of wrinkled gold and brown
Fluttered here and there,
But not quite heedless where;...
I saw a picture once by Angelo.
“Unfinished,” said the critic; “done in youth;”
And that was all, no thought of praise, forsooth!
He was informed, and doubtless it was so.
And yet, I let an hour of dreaming go
The way of all time, touched to tears and ruth,
Passion and joy, the prick of conscience’ tooth,
Before that careworn Christ’s...
From the Greek by Samuel Rogers
Playing near a Precipice
WHILE on the cliff with calm delight she kneels,
And the blue vales a thousand joys recall,
See, to the last, last verge her infant steals!
O, fly—yet stir not, speak not, lest it fall.—
Far better taught, she lays her bosom bare,
And the fond boy springs back to nestle there.
Out of Norfolk, the Gift of My Cousin, Ann Bodham
O THAT those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine,—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
“Grieve not, my child; chase all thy fears away!”
The meek...
The Farmer sat in his easy-chair,
Smoking his pipe of clay,
While his hale old wife, with busy care,
Was clearing the dinner away;
A sweet little girl, with fine blue eyes,
On her grandfather’s knee was catching flies.
The old man laid his hand on her head,
With a tear on his wrinkled face;
He thought how often her mother...
From “The Giaour”
HE who hath bent him o’er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,
(Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)
And marked the mild angelic air,
The rapture of repose, that ’s there,
...
From “The Merchant of Venice,” Act III. Sc. 2.
FAIR Portia’s counterfeit? What demi-god
Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes?
Or whether, riding on the balls of mine,
Seem they in motion? Here are severed lips,
Parted with sugar breath; so sweet a bar
Should sunder such sweet friends. Here in her hairs
The painter plays the spider;...
I would not paint — a picture —
I'd rather be the One
Its bright impossibility
To dwell — delicious — on —
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare — celestial — stir —
Evokes so sweet a Torment —
Such sumptuous — Despair —
I would not talk, like Cornets —
I'd...
I know not if thy noble worth
My country's annals claim,
For in her brief, bright history
I have not read thy name.
I know not if thou e'er didst live;
Save in the vivid thought
Of him who chronicled thy life,...
I strive in vain those features to restore
To Memory's faded tablets, which on me,
From the mute ivory, beam so lovingly,
And to recall their living light once more.
In vain I strive to pierce that veil of years,
And turn away all blinded with my tears....
