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THIS is the Le-o-pard, my child;
His tem-per's any-thing but mild.
The Le-o-pard can't change his spots,
And that - so say the Hot-ten-tots -
Is why he is so wild.
Year in, year out, he may not change,...

Nothing is better, I well think,
Than love; the hidden well-water
Is not so delicate to drink:
This was well seen of me and her.

I served her in a royal house;
I served her wine and curious meat....

Little Cowboy, what have you heard,
Up on the lonely rath's green mound?
Only the plaintive yellow bird
Sighing in sultry fields around,
Chary, chary, chary, chee-ee!,
Only the grasshopper and the bee?,...

You are the first wild violet of the year;
Young grass you are, and apple-bloom, and spray
Of honeysuckle; you are dawn of day.
And the first snow-fall! It is you I hear...

Empty as death and slow as pain
The days went by on leaden feet;
And parson's week had come again
As I walked down the little street.

Without, the weary doves were calling,...

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,...

My cot was down by a cypress grove,
And I sat by my window the whole night long,
And heard well up from the deep dark wood
A mocking-bird's passionate song.

And I thought of myself so sad and lone,...

This is the lesson I have learned of Beauty:
Who gathers flowers finds that flowers fade:
Who sets love in his heart above his duty
Misses the part for which that love was made....

("O caresse sublime.")

[April, 1871.]


Upon the grave's cold mouth there ever have caresses clung
For those who died ideally good and grand and pure and young;...

What does one gain by living? What by dying
Is lost worth having? What the daily things
Lived through together make them worth the while
For their sakes or for life's? Where's the denying...

Edward Rowland Sill, Died February 27, 1887

I held his letter in my hand,
And even while I read
The lightning flashed across the land
The word that he was dead.
...

What is she writing? Watch her now,
How fast her fingers move!
How eagerly her youthful brow
Is bent in thought above!
Her long curls, drooping, shade the light,
She puts them quick aside,...

"GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him --
Tell him the page I did n't write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,...

ABSENT.

We sat on grassy slopes that meet
With sudden dip the level strand;
The trees hung overhead - our feet
Were on the sand.

Two silent girls, a thoughtful man,...

Still on the tower stood the vane,
A black yew gloomed the stagnant air,
I peered athwart the chancel pane
And saw the altar cold and bare.
A clog of lead was round my feet,...

A letter came from Dick to-day;
A greeting glad he sends to me.
He tells of one more bloody fray,
Of how with bomb and rifle they
Have put their mark for all to see
Across rock-ribbed Gallipoli.
...

"O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!

"We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,...

Near Martinpuisch that night of hell
Two men were struck by the same shell,
Together tumbling in one heap
Senseless and limp like slaughtered sheep.

One was a pale eighteen-year-old,...

A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrificed to my desire,
A thousand beauties have betray'd
That languish in resistless fire:
The untamed heart to hand I brought,...

"Let there be light!" God spake of old,
And over chaos dark and cold,
And through the dead and formless frame
Of nature, life and order came.

Faint was the light at first that shone...