And one, perchance, will read and sigh: "What aimless songs! Why will he sing Of nature that drags out her woe Through wind and rain, and sun, and snow, From miserable spring to spring?" Then put me by....
We have graven the mountain of God with hands, As our hands were graven of God, they say, Where the seraphs burn in the sun like brands And the devils carry the rains away;...
In the world's whitest morning As hoary with hope, The Builder of Bridges Was priest and was pope: And the mitre of mystery And the canopy his, Who darkened the chasms And domed the abyss....
To every Man his Mystery, A trade and only one: The masons make the hives of men, The domes of grey or dun, But we have wrought in rose and gold The houses of the sun. ...
The angels are singing like birds in a tree In the organ of good St. Cecily: And the parson reads with his hand upon The graven eagle of great St. John: But never the fluted pipes shall go...
Forget not the field where they perished, The truest, the last of the brave, All gone--and the bright hope we cherished Gone with them, and quenched in their grave!
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture...
At midnight when the moonlit cypress trees Have woven round his grave a magic shade, Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made, There moves fresh Maia like a morning breeze...
Poet of doom, dementia, and death, Of beauty singing in a charnel house, Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid, With too much loving of some lord of hell;...
Dear friends, we are strangers; we never before Have suspected what love to each other we bore; But each of us all to his neighbor is dear, Whose heart has a throb for our time-honored pier. ...
Four summers coined their golden light in leaves, Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale, Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves, The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale; ...
Proudly, beneath her glittering dome, Our three-hilled city greets the morn; Here Freedom found her virgin home, - The Bethlehem where her babe was born.