Works

Song of the Returning Hunter (Esquimaux) - "Quiquern", The Second Jungle Book

Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,
Our furs with the drifted snow,
As we come in with the seal, the seal!...

An hour with thee! When earliest day
Dapples with gold the eastern gray,
Oh, what can frame my mind to bear
The toil and turmoil, cark and care,
New griefs, which coming hours unfold,...

Ah! whither, Love! wilt thou now carry mee?
What wontlesse fury dost thou now inspire
Into my feeble breast, too full of thee?
Whylest seeking to aslake thy raging fyre,...

Love, that long since hast to thy mighty powre
Perforce subdude my poor captived hart,
And raging now therein with restlesse stowre*,
Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part,...

Rapt with the rage of mine own ravisht thought,
Through contemplation of those goodly sights
And glorious images in heaven wrought,
Whose wondrous beauty, breathing sweet delights,...

[* See the sixth canto of the third book of the Faerie Queene, especially the second and the thirty-second stanzas; which, with his Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are evident proofs of Spenser's attachment to the ...

Stately goddess, do thou please,
Who are chief at marriages,
But to dress the bridal bed
When my love and I shall wed;
And a peacock proud shall be
Offered up by us to thee.

I will confess
With cheerfulness,
Love is a thing so likes me,
That let her lay
On me all day,
I'll kiss the hand that strikes me.

I will not, I,
Now blubb'ring, cry,...

Upon a gnarly, knotty limb
That fought the current's crest,
Where shocks of reeds peeped o'er the brim,
Wild wasps had glued their nest.

And in a sprawling cypress' grot,...

He was a boy, sun-burned and brown,
And she a girl from a neighboring town:
Dark were her eyes and dark her hair,
And her cheeks as red as the ripe peach there:
Dainty and sweet, with a far-away...

On Western plains, where shade is not,
'Neath summer skies of cloudless blue,
Where all is dry and all is hot,
There stands the town of Dandaloo,
A township where life's total sum...

I.

In reel, in waltz, in lancer's maze,
She moved with pretty air of grace,
And all the ball-room's brilliant blaze
Seemed borrowed brightness from her face!
O, winsome maid, demure and sweet!...

In the beautiful May weather,
Lapsing soon into June;
On a golden, golden day
Of the green and golden May,
When our hearts were beating tune
To the coming feet of June,...

PART ONE.


"Come right in. How are you, Fred?
Find a chair, and get a light."
"Well, old man, recovered yet
From the Mather's jam last night?"
"Didn't dance. The German's old."...

Dramatis Person'

First Tourist
Second Tourist
Yuba Bill, Driver
A Stranger



First Tourist

Look how the upland plunges into cover,...

I.

It is not early spring and yet
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
And blotted banks of violet,
My heart will dream.
Is it because the windflower apes
The beauty that was once her brow,...

Oh yesterday, I t'ink it was, while cruisin' down the street,
I met with Bill. "Hullo," he says, "let's give the girls a treat."
We'd red bandanas round our necks 'n' our shrouds new rattled down,...

I.

White as a lily moulded of Earth's milk
That eve the moon bloomed in a hyacinth sky;
Soft in the gleaming glens the wind went by,
Faint as a phantom clothed in unseen silk:...

I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,...

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety;...