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Non men gran grasia, donna.


Too much good luck no less than misery
May kill a man condemned to mortal pain,
If, lost to hope and chilled in every vein,
A sudden pardon comes to set him free....

Joy! shipmate - joy!
(Pleas'd to my Soul at death I cry;)
Our life is closed - our life begins;
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last - she leaps!...

Joy's is the magic sweet,
That makes Youth's pulses beat,
Puts music in young feet,
The old heart hears, the sad heart hears, that 's near it:

And Joy's the pleasant pain,...

When the spring comes round, and a certain day
Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees
And says, Remember,
I begin again, as if it were new,
A day of like date I once lived through,...

How pleasing simplest recollections seem!
Now summer comes, it warms me to look back
On the sweet happiness of youth's wild track,
Varied and fleeting as a summer dream:...

Whisperings, heard by wakeful maids,
To whom the night-stars guide us;
Stolen walks thro' moonlight shades,
With those we love beside us,
Hearts beating,
At meeting;
Tears starting,...

One with the Heaven above
Am I its bliss:
Part of its truth and love,
And what God is.
I heal the soul and mind:
I work their cures:
Not Grief, that rends Mankind,
But Joy endures.

The birds are pirates of her notes,
The blossoms steal her face's light;
The stars in ambush lie all day,
To take her glances for the night.
Her voice can shame rain-pelted leaves;...

In Rome, when Morgan came to town,
They nailed the Colosseum down.
A great Collector! Once his Fad
Was Coins, but when in time he had
Collected all the coin in sight,...

You will come, my bird, Bonita?
Come! For I by steep and stone
Have built such nest for you, Juanita,
As not eagle bird hath known.

Rugged! Rugged as Parnassus!
Rude, as all roads I have trod...

Jubal sang of the Wrath of God
And the curse of thistle and thorn,
But Tubal got him a pointed rod,
And scrabbled the earth for corn.
Old, old as that early mould,
Young as the sprouting grain,...

"The very last time I ever was here," he said,
"I saw much less of the quick than I saw of the dead."
- He was a man I had met with somewhere before,
But how or when I now could recall no more.
...

The Text is given from a thirteenth-century MS. in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge (B. 14, 39): it is thus the earliest text of any ballad that we possess. In the MS. it is written in long lines, four (or six, as in 4...

By the just vengeance of incensed skies,
Poor Bishop Judas late repenting dies.
The Jews engaged him with a paltry bribe,
Amounting hardly to a crown a-tribe;...

How does it happen, tell me,
That I who was most erudite of lawyers,
Who knew Blackstone and Coke
Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
The court-house ever heard, and wrote...

When through our bodies our two spirits burn
Escaping, and no more our true eyes turn
Outwards, and no more hands to fond hands yearn;

Then over those poor grassy heaps we'll meet...

Every day is Judgment Day,
Count on no to-morrow.
He who will not, when he may,
Act to-day, to-day, to-day,
Doth but borrow
Sorrow.

Saint Peter stood, at Heaven's gate,
All souls claims to adjudicate
Saying to some souls, "Enter in!"
"Go to Hell," to others, "you are steeped in sin."
When up from earth, with a great hubbub,...

O her eyes are amber-fine -
Dark and deep as wells of wine,
While her smile is like the noon
Splendor of a day of June.
If she sorrow - lo! her face
It is like a flowery space...

He sleeps where the billow
Lifts high its white crest
O'er his lone, sea-weed pillow
On Ocean's dark breast;
No shroud is around him,
No flowers bloom above,
No mourners surround him...