Works

"O my pretty pink frock,
I sha'n't be able to wear it!
Why is he dying just now?
I hardly can bear it!

"He might have contrived to live on;
But they say there's no hope whatever:...

When Mollie and I were married from the dear old cottage-home,
In the vale between the hills of fir and pine,
I parted with a sigh in a stranger-land to roam,
And to seek a western home for me and mine.
...

I am a writer's pipe; you see
In looking at my dusky face,
Complexion of the Kaffir race,
My master makes good use of me.

When he is full of grief and gloom
I smoke as if I were a shack...

Shepherd! while the lambs do feed,
And you rest beneath a tree,
Pipe upon an oaten reed
Merrily and merrily.

Should it rain do not forbear,
Rain comes from the happy sky,...

An incident of the Sepoy mutiny.


Pipes of the misty moorlands,
Voice of the glens and hills;
The droning of the torrents,
The treble of the rills!
Not the braes of bloom and heather,...

When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall,
And the sceptre passed from her hand,
The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall
To harry the English land.

The little dark men of the mountain and waste,...

THE simple Jane was sent to bring
Fresh water from the neighb'ring spring;
The matter pressed, no time to waste,
Jane took her jug, and ran in haste
The well to reach, but in her flurry...

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like "Thu bist," "Er war,"
...

I. In South Africa

Over the lonesome African plain
The stars look down, like eyes of the slain.

A bumping ride across gullies and ruts,
Now a grumble and now a jest,...

("Un Ange vit un jour.")

[LA PITI' SUPREME VIII., 1881.]


When an angel of kindness
Saw, doomed to the dark,
Men framed in his likeness,
He sought for a spark -...

It was just a very
Merry fairy dream! -
All the woods were airy
With the gloom and gleam;
Crickets in the clover
Clattered clear and strong,
And the bees droned over
Their old honey-song....

I.

Wherein is it so beautiful?
In all things dim and all things cool:
In silence, that is built of leaves
And wind and spray of waterfall;
And, golden as the half-ripe sheaves,...

'The soul is its own witness and its own refuge'


Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast:
Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed.
...

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:
But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined
The place of the damn'd - I'll tell you my mind....

I

I look upon the map that hangs by me -
Its shires and towns and rivers lined in varnished artistry -
And I mark a jutting height
Coloured purple, with a margin of blue sea.

II
...

There's a fabulous story
Full of splendor and glory,
That Arabian legends transcends;
Of the wealth without measure,
The coffers of treasure,
At the place where the rainbow ends.
...

Plague's contagious murderous breath
God's strong might with terror reveals,
As through the dreary valley of death
With its brotherhood fell it steals!

Fearfully throbs the anguish-struck heart,...

When darkness over Egypt reigned,
A darkness to be felt,
Light sweetly shone round Goshen still,
The tents where Israel dwelt.

Awestruck, the Egyptians silent lay,
They rose not from their place;...

A land, as far as the eye can see, where the waving grasses grow
Or the plains are blackened and burnt and bare, where the false mirages go
Like shifting symbols of hope deferred, land where you never know.
...

How one loves them
These wide horizons; whether Desert or Sea, -
Vague and vast and infinite; faintly clear -
Surely, hid in the far away, unknown "There,"...