All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call:“Where are you?”
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.
Then I see you,
...
I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unmemoried scents:
A honeymoon delight—
A joy of love at sight,
That ages in an hour—
My song be like a flower!
I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Along a liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it.
Notes, that with...
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all...
Even at their fairest still I love the less
The blossoms of the garden than the blooms
Won by the mountain climber: theirs the tints
And forms that most delight me,—theirs the charm
That lends an aureole to the azure heights
Whereon they flourish, children of the dews
And mountain streamlets.
But in sleep sometimes
...
In shining groups, each stem a pearly ray,
Weird flecks of light within the shadowed wood,
They dwell aloof, a spotless sisterhood.
No Angelus, except the wild bird’s lay,
Awakes these forest nuns; yet night and day
Their heads are bent, as if in prayerful mood.
A touch will mar their snow, and tempests rude
Defile; but in the mist fresh...
Of old, a man who died
Had, in his pride,
Woman and steed and slave
Heaped at his grave;
Given this sudden end
Their souls to send,
Still serving, witherward
Their lord had fared.
Grown wiser, we, to-day,
A happier way
Find for our love and grief
And death’s relief:
Flowers their fragrance strew...
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
“Shall I have naught that is fair?” saith he;
“Have naught but the bearded grain?
Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me,
I will give them all back again.”
He gazed at...
Prune thou thy words; the thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng;—
They will condense within thy soul,
And change to purpose strong.
But he who lets his feelings run
In soft luxurious flow,
Shrinks when hard service must be done,
And faints at every woe.
Faith’s meanest deed more favor bears,
Where...
Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
Stars, that in earth’s firmament do shine.
Stars they are, wherein we read our history,
As astrologers and seers of eld;
Yet not wrapped about with awful mystery,
Like the burning stars which they...
God might have bade the earth bring forth
Enough for great and small,
The oak-tree and the cedar-tree,
Without a flower at all.
We might have had enough, enough
For every want of ours,
For luxury, medicine, and toil,
And yet have had no flowers.
Then wherefore, wherefore were they made,
All dyed with rainbow...
