It is dark and lonesome here,
Beneath the windy eaves:—
The cold, cold ground my bed,
My coverlet dead leaves,
My only bedfellow
The rain that wets my sleeves!
If it be day, or night,
I know not, cannot say,
For I am like a child
Who has lost his troubled way,
Till I see the white of the hoar-frost—...
Not as when some great Captain falls
In battle, where his Country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs
To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or, in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then.
Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer...
The angel came by night
(Such angels still come down),
And like a winter cloud
Passed over London town;
Along its lonesome streets,
Where Want had ceased to weep,
Until it reached a house
Where a great man lay asleep;
The man of all his time
Who knew the most of men,
The soundest head and heart,...
“there are gains for all our losses.”
So I said when I was young.
If I sang that song again,
’T would not be with that refrain,
Which but suits an idle tongue.
Youth has gone, and hope gone with it,
Gone the strong desire for frame.
Laurels are not for the old.
Take them, lads. Give Senex gold.
What ’s an...
“under the roots of the roses,
Down in the dark, rich mould,
The dust of my dear one reposes
Like a spark which night incloses
When the ashes of day are cold.”
“Under the awful wings
Which brood over land and sea,
And whose shadows nor lift nor flee,—
This is the order of things,
And hath been from of old:...
Last night, when my tired eyes were shut with sleep,
I saw the one I love, and heard her speak,—
Heard, in the listening watches of the night,
The sweet words melting from her sweeter lips:
But what she said, or seemed to say, to me
I have forgotten, though, till morning broke,
I kept repeating her melodious words.
Long, long may Jami’s...
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...
“she has gone to be with the angels;”
So they had always said
To the little questioner asking
Of his fair, young mother, dead.
They had never told of the darkness
Of the sorrowful, silent tomb,
Nor scared the sensitive spirit
By linking a thought of gloom
With the girl-like, beautiful being,
Who patiently...
“garÇon! you—you
Snared along with this cursed crew?
(Only a child, and yet so bold,
Scarcely as much as ten years old!)
Do you hear? do you know
Why the gendarmes put you there, in the row,
You, with those Commune wretches tall,
With your face to the wall?”
“Know? To be sure I know! why not?
We ’re here...
I read the marble-lettered name,
And half in bitterness I said:
“As Dante from Ravenna came,
Our poet came from exile—dead.”
And yet, had it been asked of him
Where he would rather lay his head,
This spot he would have chosen. Dim
The city’s hum drifts o’er his grave,
And green above the hollies wave
Their...
