Works

I stand beneath the tree, whose branches shade
Thy western window, Chapel of St. John!
And hear its leaves repeat their benison
On him, whose hand if thy stones memorial laid;...

I cannot loiter on my way,
The ice is drifting through Belle Isle,
And far to seaward by Cape Ray
Broad leagues of open water smile.
Unheeded now, the inland barge
Creeps heavily, the fisher dips...

When the vexed hubbub of our world of gain
Roars round about me as I walk the street,
The myriad noise of Traffic, and the beat
Of Toil's incessant hammer, the fierce strain...

Oft seems the Time a market-town
Where many merchant-spirits meet
Who up and down and up and down
Cry out along the street

Their needs, as wares; one THUS, one SO:...

Of Chloe all the town has rung,
By ev'ry size of poets sung:
So beautiful a nymph appears
But once in twenty thousand years;
By Nature form'd with nicest care,
And faultless to a single hair....

Strike the chords softly with tremulous fingers,
While, on the threshold of happiest years,
For a brief moment fond memory lingers,
Ere we go forth to life's conflicts and fears!
...

On Hallow-Mass Eve, ere yon boune ye to rest,
Ever beware that your couch be bless'd;
Sign it with cross, and sain it with bead,
Sing the Ave, and say the Creed.
...

There is a bellowing in me, as of might
Unfleshed and visionless, mangling the air
With horrible convulse, as if it bare
The cruel weight of worlds, but could not fight...

Does fortune rend thee? Bear with thy hard fate:
Virtuous instructions ne'er are delicate.
Say, does she frown? still countermand her threats:
Virtue best loves those children that she beats.

I

That one long dirge-moan sad and deep,
Low, muffled by the solemn stress
Of such emotion as doth steep
The soul in brooding quietness,
Befits our anguished time too well,...

"And the day is a wounded boy." Garcia Lorca
...

So passes silent o'er the dead thy shade,
Brief Time; and hour by hour, and day by day,
The pleasing pictures of the present fade,
And like a summer vapour steal away!
...

(Paris, August, 1865.)


I stand at the break of day
In the Champs Elys'es.
The tremulous shafts of dawning
As they shoot o'er the Tuileries early,
Strike Luxor's cold gray spire,...

Grey dawn on the sand-hills, the night wind has drifted
All night from the rollers a scent of the sea;
With the dawn the grey fog his battalions has lifted,
At the call of the morning they scatter and flee.
...

Low clouds, the lightning veins and cleaves,
Torn from the forest of the storm,
Sweep westward like enormous leaves
O'er field and farm.

And in the west, on burning skies,...

Above the town a monstrous wheel is turning,
With glowing spokes of red,
Low in the west its fiery axle burning;
And, lost amid the spaces overhead,
A vague white moth, the moon, is fluttering.
...

Down at the end of the iron lane
I see the sunset's glare,
And the red bars lie across the sky
Like steps of a wondrous stair.

Below, the throng, with unlifted eye,...

O God! my God! have mercy now.
I faint, I fall. Men say that Thou
Didst die for me, for such as me,
Patient of ill, and death, and scorn,
And that my sin was as a thorn...

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit, -- Life!

Weary hearts! weary hearts! by the cares of life oppressed,
Ye are wand'ring in the shadows -- ye are sighing for a rest:
There is darkness in the heavens, and the earth is bleak below,...