Works

"Et potis es nigrum vitio praefigere Delta." - PERSIUS.


It was a young Examiner, scarce thirty were his years,
His name our University loves, honours, and reveres:...

A train went through a burial gate,
A bird broke forth and sang,
And trilled, and quivered, and shook his throat
Till all the churchyard rang;

And then adjusted his little notes,...

I

From Wynyard's Gap the livelong day,
The livelong day,
We beat afoot the northward way
We had travelled times before.
The sun-blaze burning on our backs,...

There are whose study is of smells,
And to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
Makes something worse.

Some cultivate in broths impure
The clients of our body, these,...

There stands in th' leafless Ghetto
One spare-leaved, ancient tree;
Above the Ghetto noises
It moans eternally.

In wonderment it muses,
And murmurs with a sigh:
"Alas! how God-forsaken...

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)...

Three sang of love together: one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger-tips;
And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow...

The sweetest singer once thou wast, but art no more;
An elf thou wast of what thou now shalt be,
Where thou art in realms of that celestial shore;
There thou shalt sing through all eternity....

A friend for you and a friend for me,
A friend to understand;
To cheer the way and help the day
With heart as well as hand:
With heart as well as hand, my dear,
And share the things we 've planned...

Of three in One and One in three
My narrow mind would doubting be
Till Beauty, Grace and Kindness met
And all at once were Juliet.

Of all the sickly forms of verse,
Commend me to the triolet.
It makes bad writers somewhat worse:
Of all the sickly forms of verse,
That fall beneath a reader's curse,
It is the feeblest jingle yet....

To commemorate the virtue of Homoeopathy in restoring one apparently drowned.

Love, that in a tear was drown'd,
Lives revived by a tear.
Stella heard them mourn around
Love that in a tear was drown'd,...

A squad of regular infantry,
In the Commune's closing days,
Had captured a crowd of rebels
By the wall of Pere-la-Chaise.

There were desperate men, wild women,
And dark-eyed Amazon girls,...

You told me, in your drunken-boasting mood,
How once you butchered prisoners. That was good!
I'm sure you felt no pity while they stood
Patient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should.
...

O, richly soiled and richly sunned,
Exuberant, fervid, and fecund!
Is this the fixed condition
On which may Northern pilgrim come,
To imbibe thine ether-air, and sum
Thy store of old tradition?...

It's certainly late. I must earn something.
But they're all going right by today with smug expressions on their faces.
They don't want to give me a single good-luck penny.
It's a miserable life....

No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I'll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?

With purpose strong to do or die,
The race of life he ran,
With love supreme to God on high,
And equal love to man.

Some flaws the earthen vessel marred,
Which all could clearly see;...

Of all our pains, since man was curst,
I mean of body, not the mental,
To name the worst, among the worst,
The dental sure is transcendental;
Some bit of masticating bone,...

(Read Before A Meeting Of The Danville Scribbler Club.)


Dear friends, to-night the inspiration of my theme
Is not the baseless fabric of a weird, fantastic dream--...