There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.
We are stronger, and are better,
Under manhood’s sterner reign:
Still we feel that something sweet
Followed youth, with flying feet,
And will...
The life of man
Is an arrow’s flight,
Out of darkness
Into light,
And out of light
Into darkness again;
Perhaps to pleasure,
Perhaps to pain!
There must be Something,
Above, or below;
Somewhere unseen
A mighty Bow,
A Hand that tires not,
A sleepless Eye
That sees...
I see the star-lights quiver,
Like jewels in the river;
The bank is hid with sedge;
What if I slip the edge?
I thought I knew the way
By night as well as day:
But how a lover goes astray!
The place is somewhat lonely—
I mean for just one only;
I brought the boat ashore
An hour ago or more....
We were twin brothers, tall and hale,
Glad wanderers over hill and dale.
We stood within the twilight shade
Of pines that rimmed a Southern glade.
He said: “Let ’s settle, if we can,
Which of us is the stronger man.
“We ’ll try a flight shot, high and good,
Across the green glade toward the wood.”
And so we bent in sheer...
The eagle of the armies of the West,
Dying upon his alp, near to the sky,
Through the slow days that paled the imperial eye,
But could not tame the proud fire of his breast,—
Gone with the mighty pathos! Only rest
Remains where passed that struggle stern and high;
Rest, silence, broken sometimes by the cry
Of mother and eaglets round the...
The song-birds? are they flown away?
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing days to rhyme?—
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
A sweet assertion of the hush.
The Heart soars up like a bird
From a nest of care;
Up, up to a larger sky,
To a softer air.
No eye can measure its flight
And no hand can tame;
It mounts in beauty and light,
In music and flame.
Of all the changes of Time
There is none like this;
The heart soars up like a bird
At the stroke of...
There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain,
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.
We are stronger, and are better,
Under manhood’s sterner reign;
Still we feel that something sweet
Followed youth, with flying feet,
And will...
A Ballad
THERE ’s a legend that ’s told of a gypsy who dwelt
In the lands where the pyramids be;
And her robe was embroidered with stars, and her belt
With devices right wondrous to see;
And she lived in the days when our Lord was a child
On his mother’s immaculate breast;
When he fled from his foes,—when to Egypt exiled,
...
I Hear the low wind wash the softening snow,
The low tide loiter down the shore. The night,
Full filled with April forecast hath no light.
The salt wave on the sedge-flat pulses slow.
Through the hid furrows lisp in murmurous flow
The thaw’s shy ministers; and hark! The height
Of heaven grows weird and loud with unseen flight
Of strong...
