Works

Of all that Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels with our own competing,
The strangest is the Haschish plant,
And what will follow on its eating.
What pictures to the taster rise,...

To a young physician, with Dore's picture of Christ healing the sick.


So stood of old the holy Christ
Amidst the suffering throng;
With whom His lightest touch sufficed...

My lady walks her morning round,
My lady's page her fleet greyhound,
My lady's hair the fond winds stir,
And all the birds make songs for her.

Her thrushes sing in Rathburn bowers,...

O strong, upwelling prayers of faith,
From inmost founts of life ye start,
The spirit's pulse, the vital breath
Of soul and heart!

From pastoral toil, from traffic's din,...

"O for a knight like Bayard,
Without reproach or fear;
My light glove on his casque of steel,
My love-knot on his spear!

"O for the white plume floating
Sad Zutphen's field above,...

The burly driver at my side,
We slowly climbed the hill,
Whose summit, in the hot noontide,
Seemed rising, rising still.
At last, our short noon-shadows bid
The top-stone, bare and brown,...

In the old Hebrew myth the lion's frame,
So terrible alive,
Bleached by the desert's sun and wind, became
The wandering wild bees' hive;
And he who, lone and naked-handed, tore...

I have not felt, o'er seas of sand,
The rocking of the desert bark;
Nor laved at Hebron's fount my hand,
By Hebron's palm-trees cool and dark;
Nor pitched my tent at even-fall,...

Against the wooded hills it stands,
Ghost of a dead home, staring through
Its broken lights on wasted lands
Where old-time harvests grew.

Unploughed, unsown, by scythe unshorn,...

I.

Far from his close and noisome cell,
By grassy lane and sunny stream,
Blown clover field and strawberry dell,
And green and meadow freshness, fell
The footsteps of his dream....

Have ye heard of our hunting, o'er mountain and glen,
Through cane-brake and forest, the hunting of men?
The lords of our land to this hunting have gone,
As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn;...

It was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain
Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass again;
The first sharp frosts had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay...

From Institutes of Manu.


The soul itself its awful witness is.
Say not in evil doing, "No one sees,"
And so offend the conscious One within,
Whose ear can hear the silences of sin.
...

I.

Fate summoned, in gray-bearded age, to act
A history stranger than his written fact,
Him who portrayed the splendor and the gloom
Of that great hour when throne and altar fell...

Voice of a people suffering long,
The pathos of their mournful song,
The sorrow of their night of wrong!
Their cry like that which Israel gave,
A prayer for one to guide and save,...

We cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!

We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom's southern line,...

The Khan came from Bokhara town
To Hamza, santon of renown.

"My head is sick, my hands are weak;
Thy help, O holy man, I seek."

In silence marking for a space...

Under the great hill sloping bare
To cove and meadow and Common lot,
In his council chamber and oaken chair,
Sat the worshipful Governor Endicott.
A grave, strong man, who knew no peer...

Ere down yon blue Carpathian hills
The sun shall sink again,
Farewell to life and all its ills,
Farewell to cell and chain!

These prison shades are dark and cold,
But, darker far than they,...

The shadows round the inland sea
Are deepening into night;
Slow up the slopes of Ossipee
They chase the lessening light.
Tired of the long day's blinding heat,
I rest my languid eye,...