Works

It's good the great green earth to roam,
Where sights of awe the soul inspire;
But oh, it's best, the coming home,
The crackle of one's own hearth-fire!
You've hob-nobbed with the solemn Past;...

When Mistress Peggy moves around,
Her dresses make a mocking sound.
"You can't catch me!" they seem to say--
I often steal a ride that way.

We let Ontario farmers sing
About the joys the woods do bring,
But we in regions of Northwest
Do think prairie farms the best,
For those poor men who swing the axe
On their strength 'tis a heavy tax,...

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these:
A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees;

A vagrant's morning wide and blue,
In early fall when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,...

(To the Editor)



Yes; your up-dated modern page -
All flower-fresh, as it appears -
Can claim a time-tried lineage,

That reaches backward fifty years...

Voice of a people suffering long,
The pathos of their mournful song,
The sorrow of their night of wrong!
Their cry like that which Israel gave,
A prayer for one to guide and save,...

On Jubilee Day the Ramsbottoms
Invited relations to tea,
Including young Albert's grandmother,
An awkward old . . party, was she.

She'd seen Queen Victoria's accession...

When Kneller's works, of various grace,
Were to fair Venus shown,
The Goddess spied in every face
Some features of her own.

Just so, (and pointing with her hand)
So shone, says she, my eyes,...

When I, good friends, was called to the Bar,
I'd an appetite fresh and hearty,
But I was, as many young barristers are,
An impecunious party.
I'd a swallow-tail coat of a beautiful blue...

God hides from man the reck'ning day, that he
May fear it ever for uncertainty;
That being ignorant of that one, he may
Expect the coming of it every day.

Swerve to the left, son Roger, he said,
When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit,
Swerve to the left, then out at his head,
And the Lord God give you joy of it!

The blue owls on my father's hood...

Diodorus has recorded an impressive Egyptian ceremonial, the judgment of the dead by the living. When the corpse, duly embalmed, had been placed by the margin of the Acherusian Lake, and before consigning it to the bark that wa...

Two nymphs, both nearly of an age,
Of numerous charms possess'd,
A warm dispute once chanced to wage,
Whose temper was the best.


The worth of each had been complete,...

The Judicious Jubilant Jay,
who did up her Back Hair every morning with a Wreath of Roses,
Three feathers, and a Gold Pin.

Look how he throws them up and up,
The beautiful golden balls!
They hang aloft in the purple air,
And there never is one that falls.

He sends them hot from his steady hand,...

Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face, to die;

Stooping as low as the otter's window,...

When the drums begin to beat
Down the street,
When the poles are fetched and guyed,
When the tight-rope's stretched and tied,
When the dance-girls make salaam,
When the snake-bag wakes alarm,...

I.

They went to sea in a sieve, they did;
In a sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea....

God bless you, dear Queen Bess!
May nothing you dismay,
But health and peace and happiness
Be yours, this Christmas day.

Here's fruit to feed our busy bee,
And flowers for her nose....

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw....