Backward turn, oh! recollection! Far, far back to childhoods' days; To those treasures of affection, 'Round which loving memory plays Show to me the loving faces Of my parents, now no more, -...
With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise, And the winds are one with the clouds and beams - Midsummer days! Midsummer days!...
Spring at her height on a morn at prime, Sails that laugh from a flying squall, Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme - Youth is the sign of them, one and all....
O sad-eyed man who yonder sits, Face in a book from morn till night, Who, though the world should go to bits, Pores on right through the waning light; O is it sorrow or delight...
O ships upon the sea, O shapes of air, O lands whose names are made of spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre!...
The Cit, relying on his trade, Which, like all other things, may fade, Longs for a curricle and villa: This Hatchet splendidly supplies, The other Cock'ril builds, or buys,...
"Fall in! Now, get a move on!" (Curse the rain.) We splash away along the straggling village, Out to the flat rich country green with June.... And sunset flares across wet crops and tillage,...
I have been tried, Tried in the fire, And I say this, As the result of dire distress, And tribulation sore-- That a man's happiness doth not consist Of that he hath, but of the faith...
Before the rain, low in the obscure east, Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray; Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased, Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay...
When age or chance has made me blind, So that the path I cannot find, And when my falls and stumblings are More than the stones i' th' street by far, Go thou afore, and I shall well...
Beloved, let us once more praise the rain. Let us discover some new alphabet, For this, the often praised; and be ourselves, The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,...
Below the sunset's range of rose, Below the heaven's deepening blue, Down woodways where the balsam blows, And milkweed tufts hang, gray with dew, A Jersey heifer stops and lows -...