Thou happiest thing alive,
Anomaly of earth!
If sound thy lineage give,
Thou art the natural birth
Of affluent Joy—
Thy mother’s name was Mirth,
Thou little singing boy!
Thy star—it was a sun!
Thy time the month of May,
When streams to music run,
And birds sing all the day:
Nature...
No, not in the halls of the noble and proud,
Where Fashion assembles her glittering crowd,
Where all is in beauty and splendor arrayed,
Were the nuptials performed of the meek Quaker maid.
Nor yet in the temple those rites which she took,—
By the altar, the mitre-crowned bishop and book,
Where oft in her jewels stands proudly the bride,...
He sang the airs of olden times
In soft, low tones to sacred rhymes,
Devotional, but quaint;
His fingers touched the viol’s strings,
And at their gentle vibratings
The glory of an angel’s wings
Hung o’er that aged saint!
His thin, white locks, like silver threads
On which the sun its radiance sheds,
Or like the...
’t was summer, and the spot a cool retreat—
Where curious eyes came not, nor footstep rude
Disturbed the lovers’ chosen solitude:
Beneath an oak there was a mossy seat,
Where we reclined, while birds above us wooed
Their mates in songs voluptuously sweet.
A limpid brook went murmuring by our feet,
And all conspired to urge the tender mood...
There ’s not a breath the dewy leaves to stir;
There ’s not a cloud to spot the sapphire sky;
All Nature seems a silent worshipper:
While saintly Dian, with great, argent eye,
Looks down as lucid from the depths on high
As she to Earth were Heaven’s interpreter;
Each twinkling little star shrinks back, too shy
Its lesser glory to obtrude...
