Works

The Sabbath bells are knolling slow,
The summer morn how fair!
Whilst father, mother, children go,
And seek the house of prayer.

Some, musing, roam the churchyard round,...

I

'Twas on a windy night,
At two o'clock in the morning,
An Irish lad so tight,
All wind and weather scorning,
At Judy Callaghan's door.
Sitting upon the palings,...

Tune - "Dalkeith Maiden Bridge."


I.

O, sad and heavy should I part,
But for her sake sae far awa;
Unknowing what my way may thwart,
My native land sae far awa....

After A. C. S.


In Spring there are lashings of new books,
In Autumn fresh novels are sold,
They are many, but my shelf has few books,
My comrades, the favourites of old;...

The news came down on the Castlereagh, and went to the world at large,
That twenty thousand traveling sheep, with Saltbush Bill in charge,
Were drifting down from a dried-out run to ravage the Castlereagh;...

Serene, indifferent of Fate,
Thou sittest at the Western Gate;

Upon thy height, so lately won,
Still slant the banners of the sun;

Thou seest the white seas strike their tents,...

Whene'er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene'er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,
To higher levels rise.

The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,...

"Thou shalt be - Nothing." - OMAR KHAYYAM.
"Tombless, with no remembrance." - W. SHAKESPEARE.

Dead shalt thou lie; and nought
Be told of thee or thought,
For thou hast plucked not of the Muses' tree:...

Say, lovely youth, that dost my heart command,
Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand?
Must then her name the wretched writer prove,
To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love?...

Oh, yes, we've be'n fixin' up some sence we sold that piece o' groun'
Fer a place to put a golf-lynx to them crazy dudes from town.
(Anyway, they laughed like crazy when I had it specified,...

SATIRES AND EPISTLES OF HORACE IMITATED. -


ADVERTISEMENT.
...

The kettle descants in a cozy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband's face,
And then at her guest's, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;...

"Sixpence a week," says the girl to her lover,
"Aunt used to bring me, for she could confide
In me alone, she vowed. 'Twas to cover
The cost of her headstone when she died.
And that was a year ago last June;...

"And now to God the Father," he ends,
And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles:
Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,
And emotion pervades the crowded aisles....

"Would it had been the man of our wish!"
Sighs her mother. To whom with vehemence she
In the wedding-dress the wife to be -
"Then why were you so mollyish
As not to insist on him for me!"...

"My bride is not coming, alas!" says the groom,
And the telegram shakes in his hand. "I own
It was hurried! We met at a dancing-room
When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,...

They sit and smoke on the esplanade,
The man and his friend, and regard the bay
Where the far chalk cliffs, to the left displayed,
Smile sallowly in the decline of day....

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair
Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,
A type of decayed gentility;
And by some small signs he well can guess
That she comes to him almost breakfastless.
...

"You see those mothers squabbling there?"
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
One says in tears, ''Tis mine lies here!'
Another, 'Nay, mine, you Pharisee!'
Another, 'How dare you move my flowers...

"My stick!" he says, and turns in the lane
To the house just left, whence a vixen voice
Comes out with the firelight through the pane,
And he sees within that the girl of his choice...