O God, whose thunder shakes the sky,
Whose eye this atom globe surveys,
To thee, my only rock, I fly,
Thy mercy in thy justice praise.
The mystic mazes of thy will,
The shadows of celestial light,
Are past the power of human skill;
But what the Eternal acts is right.
Oh, teach me in the trying hour,
When...
Vital spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, O quit this mortal frame!
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
O, the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life!
Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my...
I.
there was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,—
The glory and the freshness of the dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore:
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now...
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?
My days among the dead are passed;
Around me I behold,
Where’er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old;
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.
With them I take delight in weal,
And seek relief in woe;
And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe,
My...
FOREVER with the Lord!
Amen! so let it be!
Life from the dead is in that word,
And immortality.
Here in the body pent,
Absent from him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day’s march nearer home.
My Father’s house on high,
Home of my soul! how near,
At times, to faith’s foreseeing eye...
Up! quit thy bower! late wears the hour,
Long have the rooks cawed round the tower;
O’er flower and tree loud hums the bee,
And the wild kid sports merrily.
The sun is bright, the sky is clear;
Wake, lady, wake! and hasten here.
Up, maiden fair! and bind thy hair,
And rouse thee in the breezy air!
The lulling stream that soothed...
In the barn the tenant cock,
Close to partlet perched on high,
Briskly crows (the shepherd’s clock!)
Jocund that the morning’s nigh.
Swiftly from the mountain’s brow,
Shadows, nursed by night, retire:
And the peeping sunbeam now
Paints with gold the village spire.
Philomel forsakes the thorn,
Plaintive where...
From “The Minstrel”
BUT who the melodies of morn can tell?
The wild brook babbling down the mountainside;
The lowing herd; the sheepfold’s simple bell;
The pipe of early shepherd dim descried
In the lone valley; echoing far and wide
The clamorous horn along the cliffs above;
The hollow murmur of the ocean-tide;
The...
Beneath a shivering canopy reclined,
Of aspen-leaves that wave without a wind,
I love to lie, when lulling breezes stir
The spiry cones that tremble on the fir;
Or wander mid the dark-green fields of broom,
When peers in scattered tufts the yellow bloom;
Or trace the path with tangling furze o’errun,
When bursting seed-bells crackle in...
