Thy one white leaf is open to the sky,
And o’er thy heart swift lights and shadows pass,—
The wooing winds seem loath to wander by,
Jealous of sunshine and the summer grass.
Thy sylvan loveliness is pure and strong,
For thou art bright and yet not overbold—
Like a young maid apart from fashion’s throng—
A virgin dowered with a...
Moonlight song OF THE MOCKING-BIRD
EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.
NIGHT MISTS
SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature’s dreams....
A throat of thunder, a tameless heart,
And a passion malign and free,
He is no sheik of the desert sand.
But an Arab of the sea!
He sprang from the womb of some wild cloud,
And was born to smite and slay:
To soar like a million hawks set free,
And swoop on his ocean prey!
He has scourged the Sea till her mighty breast...
Just ere the darkness is withdrawn,
In seasons of cold or heat,
Close to the boundary line of Dawn
These mystical brothers meet.
They clasp their weird and shadowy hands,
As they listen each to each,
But never a mortal understands
Their strange immortal speech.
Out of the mighty Yule log came
The crooning of the lithe wood-flame,—
A single bar of music fraught
With cheerful yet half pensive thought,—
A thought elusive: out of reach,
Yet trembling on the verge of speech.
I
the voice of England is a trumpet tone
When that inviolate Mother wills it so:
Nations may rise and fall, and tyrants go
Upon their devious, darkened paths: alone
England preserves her people and her throne,
Her ancient freedom, her perpetual flow
Of broad and brightened life; time shall not show
This mighty Nation pitiful and...
I look upon thy happy face—
Dear child with those undarkened eyes
Like glimpses of transparent skies—
And dream of things which have no place
In that small, golden head of thine;
Things that no ten-year-old has yet
Dared in his roguish wit to set
To thought, or word, or rhythmic line.
And it is better so, I think,
...
He sleeps at last—a hero of his race.
Dead!—and the night lies softly on his face,
While the faint summer stars, like sentinels,
Hover above his lonely resting-place.
A soldier, yet less soldier than a man,
Who gave to justice what a soldier can,—
The courage of his arm, a patient heart,
And the fire-soul that flamed when wrong began....
The sun is sinking over hill and sea,
Its red light fires a spectral line of shore;
Night droops upon our half-world mistily
With sombre glory and ghost-haunted lore;
The stars show dim and pallid in the sky,
Vague, wraith-white glimmerings of volcanic spheres,
And a slim crescent of the moon appears
Like some young herald in the...
I
said life to Death: “Methinks, if I were you,
I would not carry such an awesome face
To terrify the helpless human race;
And if indeed those wondrous tales be true
Of happiness beyond, and if I knew
About the boasted blessings of that place,
I would not hide so miserly all trace
Of my vast knowledge, Death, if I were you:...
