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[In an interview with Lawrence Barrett, he said: "The literature of the New World must look to the West for its poetry."]

Not to the crowded East,
Where, in a well-worn groove,...

[In an interview with Lawrence Barrett, he said: "The literature of the New World must look to the West for its poetry."]


Not to the crowded East,
Where, in a well-worn groove,...

A toast to the splendid daughters
Of the New World over the waters,
A world that is great as new;
Daughters of brave old races,
Daughters of heights and spaces,
Broad seas and broad earth places -...

She waited in a rose-hued room;
A wanton-hearted creature she,
But beautiful and bright to see
As some great orchid just in bloom.

Upon wide cushions stretched at ease...

Only a spar from a broken ship
Washed in by a careless wave;
But it brought back the smile of a vanished lip,
And his past peered out of the grave.

Only a leaf that an idle breeze...

God, what a world, if men in street and mart
Felt that same kinship of the human heart
Which makes them, in the face of flame and flood,
Rise to the meaning of true Brotherhood!

The highest culture is to speak no ill;
The best reformer is the man whose eyes
Are quick to see all beauty and all worth;
And by his own discreet, well-ordered life,
Alone reproves the erring....

Another morning's banners are unfurled -
Another day looks smiling on the world.
It holds new laurels for thy soul to win;
Mar not its grace by slothfulness or sin,
Nor sad, away,
Send it to yesterday.

A baby went to heaven while it slept,
And, waking, missed its mother's arms, and wept.
Those angel tear-drops, falling earthward through
God's azure skies, into the turquoise grew.

He who possesses virtue at its best,
Or greatness in the true sense of the word,
Has one day started even with that herd
Whose swift feet now speed but at sin's behest....

As I sat in my opera box last night
In a glimmer of gems and a blaze of light,
And smiling that all might see,
This curious thought came all unsought -
That there were two of me.
...

One leaned on velvet cushions like a queen -
To see him pass, the hero of an hour,
Whom men called great. She bowed with languid mien,
And smiled, and blushed, and knew her beauty's power.
...

One day Ambition, in his endless round,
All filled with vague and nameless longings, found
Slow wasting Genius, who from spot to spot
Went idly grazing, through the Realms of Thought.
...

Two dead men boarded a spectral ship
In the astral Port of Space;
On that ghost-filled barque, they met in the dark,
And halted, face to face.

'Now whither away' - called one of the ghosts,...

So much one thought about the life beyond
He did not drain the waters of his pond;
And when death laid his children 'neath the sod
He called it - 'the mysterious will of God.'...

(Suggested by the lives of Napoleon and Josephine.)


I.

One night was full of rapture and delight -
Of reunited arms and swooning kisses,
And all the unnamed and unnumbered blisses...

One room is full of luxury, and dim
With that soft moonlit radiance of light
That she best loves, who sits and dreams of him
Her heart has crowned as knight.

And one is bare, and comfortless, and dim...

A humble wild-rose, pink and slender,
Was plucked and placed in a bright bouquet,
Beside a Jacqueminot's royal splendour,
And both in my lady's boudoir lay.

Said the haughty bud, in a tone of scorning,...

Two sat down in the morning time,
One to sing and one to spin.
All men listened the song sublime -
But no one listened the dull wheel's din.

The singer sat in a pleasant nook,...

There was a man, it was said one time,
Who went astray in his youthful prime.
Can the brain keep cool and the heart keep quiet
When the blood is a river that's running riot?...