• Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,--
    ...The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
    ...Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
    'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
    All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
    ...Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
    ...Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
    'Tis visible...

  • Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
    Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
    Give me a field where the unmowed grass grows,
    Give me an arbor, give me the trellised grape,
    Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content,
    Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of...

  • The Baby sits in her cradle,
      Watching the world go round,
    Enrapt in a mystical silence,
      Amid all the tumult of sound.
    She must be akin to the flowers,
        For no one has heard
        A whispered word
    From this silent baby of ours.

    Wondering, she looks at the children,
      As they merrily laughing pass,
    And smiles...

  • Sonnet Xxx.
    when to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
    Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe,
    And...

  • Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    “Das stille Land”

            INTO the Silent Land!
        Ah, who shall lead us thither?
    Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather,
    And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand.
        Who leads us with a gentle hand
              Thither, oh, thither,
            Into the Silent Land?

    ...


  •  * * *


    Silent, Silent Night

    Quench the holy light

    Of thy torches bright.


    For possess'd of Day

    Thousand spirits stray

    That sweet joys betray.


    Why should joys be sweet

    Used with deceit

    Nor with sorrows meet?


    But an honest...

  • There is no Silence in the Earth — so silent

    As that endured

    Which uttered, would discourage Nature

    And haunt the World.

  •         I see the sons of Genius rise

                The nobles of our land;

            And foremost in the gathering ranks

                I see the poet band.

     

            That Priesthood of the beautiful,

                To whom alone 'tis given

            To lift our spirits from the dust,
    ...