When leaves turn outward to the light,
And all the roads are fringed with green,
When larks are pouring, high, unseen,
The joy they find in song and flight,
Then I, too, with the lark would wing
My little flight, and, soaring, sing.
When larks drop downward to the nest,
And day drops downward to the sea,
And song and wing...
A breath can fan love’s flame to burning,—
Make firm resolve of trembling doubt.
But, strange! at fickle fancy’s turning,
The selfsame breath can blow it out.
When psyche’s friend becomes her lover,
How sweetly these conditions blend!
But, oh, what anguish to discover
Her lover has become—her friend!
God keep you, dearest, all this lonely night:
The winds are still,
The moon drops down behind the western hill;
God keep you safely, dearest, till the light.
God keep you then when slumber melts away,
And care and strife
Take up new arms to fret our waking life,
God keep you through the battle of the day.
God keep you...
“praise ye the Lord!” The psalm to-day
Still rises on our ears,
Borne from the hills of Boston Bay
Through five times fifty years,
When Winthrop’s fleet from Yarmouth crept
Out to the open main,
And through the widening waters swept,
In April sun and rain.
“Pray to the Lord with fervent lips,”
The leader...
in their ragged regimentals,
Stood the old Continentals,
Yielding not,
While the grenadiers were lunging,
And like hail fell the plunging
Cannon-shot;
When the files
Of the isles,
From the smoky night-encampment, bore the banner of the rampant
Unicorn;
And...
His way in farming all men knew;
Way wide, forecasting, free,
A liberal tilth that made the tiller poor.
That huge Websterian plough what furrows drew
Through fallows fattened from the barren sea!
Yoked to that plough and matched for mighty size,
What oxen moved!—in progress equal, sure,
Unconscious of resistance, as of force...
“what care I, what cares he,
What cares the world of the life we know?
Little they reck of the shadowless plains,
The shelterless mesa, the sun and the rains,
The wild, free life, as the winds that blow.”
With his broad sombrero,
His worn chapparejos,
And clinking spurs,
Like a Centaur he speeds,
...
“all quiet along the Potomac,” they say,
“Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
’T is nothing—a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost—only one of the men,
Moaning out, all alone, the death-rattle.”
Some tell us ’t is a burnin’ shame
To make the naygers fight;
An’ that the thrade of bein’ kilt
Belongs but to the white:
But as for me, upon my sowl!
So liberal are we here,
I ’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself,
On every day in the year.
On every day in the year, boys,
And in every hour of the...
