Down the world with Marna!
That ’s the life for me!
Wandering with the wandering wind,
Vagabond and unconfined!
Roving with the roving rain
Its unboundaried domain!
Kith and kin of wander-kind,
Children of the sea!
Petrels of the sea-drift!
Swallows of the lea!
Arabs of the whole wide girth
Of the wind-...
I
whose furthest footstep never strayed
Beyond the village of his birth
Is but a lodger for the night
In this old wayside inn of earth.
To-morrow he shall take his pack,
And set out for the ways beyond
On the old trail from star to star,
An alien and a vagabond.
II
If any record of our names
Be blown...
Bugles!
and the Great Nation thrills and leaps to arms!
Prompt, unconstrained, immediate,
Without misgiving and without debate,
Too calm, too strong for fury or alarms,
The people blossoms armies and puts forth
The splendid summer of its noiseless might;
For the old sap of fight
Mounts up in South and North,
The thrill...
To what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star,
Compelled to what unchosen end,
Across the sea that knows no beach
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!
The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that...
When i am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray;
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea,
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes...
Ho, a song by the fire!
(Pass the pipes, fill the bowl!)
Ho, a song by the fire!
—With a skoal!…
For the wolf wind is whining in the doorways,
And the snow drifts deep along the road,
And the ice-gnomes are marching from their Norways,
And the great white cold walks abroad.
(Boo-oo-o! pass the bowl!)
For here by the...
Who ’ll have the crumpled pieces of a heart?
Let him take mine!
Who ’ll give his whole of passion for a part,
And call ’t divine?
Who ’ll have the soiled remainder of desire?
Who ’ll warm his fingers at a burnt-out fire?
Who ’ll drink the lees of love, and cast i’ the mire
The nobler wine?
Let him come here, and kiss me on the...
And if he should come again
In the old glad way,
I should smile and take his hand.
What were there to say?
I should close my eyes and smile,
And my soul would be
Like the peace of summer noons
Beside the sea.
Voices of Unseen Spirits
HERE falls no light of sun nor stars;
No stir nor striving here intrudes;
No moan nor merry-making mars
The quiet of these solitudes.
Submerged in sleep, the passive soul
Is one with all the things that seem;
Night blurs in one confusëd whole
Alike the dreamer and the dream.
O dwellers...
When I am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray;
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea,
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes...
