Works

"For myself alone, I would not be
Ambitious in my wish; but, for you,
I would be trebled twenty times myself;
A thousand times more fair,
Ten thousand times more rich."

"For old sake's sake!" 'Twere hard to choose
Words fitter for an old-world Muse
Than these, that in their cadence bring
Faint fragrance of the posy-ring,
And charms that rustic lovers use.
...

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture...

And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St Peters there are poplars, crows...

Weeping for another's woe,
Tears flow then that would not flow
When our sorrow was our own,
And the deadly, stiffening blow
Was upon our own heart given
In the moments that have flown!
...

The age is dull and mean. Men creep,
Not walk; with blood too pale and tame
To pay the debt they owe to shame;
Buy cheap, sell dear; eat, drink, and sleep
Down-pillowed, deaf to moaning want;...

Beside the open window she is lying,
Through which comes softly in the balmy air,
And fans her wasted cheek; but slowly dying,
She seeth not that autumn's finger fair
Tinges the golden landscape everywhere....

The house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone.
From the balcony I can hear the Isar moan,
Can see the white
Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under a sky of stone.
...

Beyond the Cheviots and the Tweed,
Beyond the Firth of Forth,
My memory returns at speed
To Scotland and the North.

For still I keep, and ever shall,
A warm place in my heart for Scotland,...

(AFTER SIR E. A.)

1. From the third Sa'dine Box of the eighth Gazelle of Ghazal.

Ya Ya! Best-Beloved! I look to thy dimples and drink;
Tiddlihi! to thy cheek-pits and chin-pit, my Tulip, my Pink!...

(February 23, 1821)

At midnight when the moonlit cypress trees
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia like a morning breeze...

(With Original Drawings By G. H. Boughton.)


Shade of Herrick, Muse of Locker,
Help me sing of Knickerbocker!

BOUGHTON, had you bid me chant
Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant!...

(January 19, 1909)

Poet of doom, dementia, and death,
Of beauty singing in a charnel house,
Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid,
With too much loving of some lord of hell;...

The Briarwood.

The fateful slumber floats and flows
About the tangle of the rose;
But lo! the fated hand and heart
To rend the slumberous curse apart!

The Council Room.
...

January 25, 1859

His birthday. - Nay, we need not speak
The name each heart is beating, -
Each glistening eye and flushing cheek
In light and flame repeating!
...

Dear friends, we are strangers; we never before
Have suspected what love to each other we bore;
But each of us all to his neighbor is dear,
Whose heart has a throb for our time-honored pier.
...

Four summers coined their golden light in leaves,
Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale,
Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves,
The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale;
...

This verdant field that smiles to Heaven
In Nature's bright array,
From common uses set apart,
We consecrate to-day.

"God's Acre" be it fitly called,
For when, beneath the sod,...

Proudly, beneath her glittering dome,
Our three-hilled city greets the morn;
Here Freedom found her virgin home, -
The Bethlehem where her babe was born.

The lordly roofs of traffic rise...

For thee alone I brave the boundless deep,
Those eyes my light through every distant sea;
My waking thoughts, the dream that gilds my sleep,
The noon-tide revery, all are given to thee,...