Works

Once upon a time there lived a Tinkle-Tinkle. I cannot tell you what he was like, because no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself. Sometimes he lived on the ground, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in the water, sometime...

Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.
Fashioned the form of a tribesman, gaily he whistled and sung,...

"Now there were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor."



Jack Barrett went to Quetta
Because they told him to.
He left his wife at Simla
On three-fourths his monthly screw....

Tim of the Tales they call me,
With a welcome heart and hand;
But little they hold my brother
For all his cattle and land.

If I be walking the high road
From Clare that goes to the sea,...

'Twas the glowing log of a picnic fire where a red light should not be,
Or the curtained glow of a sick room light in a window that faced the sea....

"I hear the piano playing
Just as a ghost might play."
" O, but what are you saying?
There's no piano to-day;
Their old one was sold and broken;
Years past it went amiss."...

The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky;
Young Albert, in the forest's edge, has heard a rustling sound,...

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?
"I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."
Your friends, then?...

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk,
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
...

When trouble haunts me, need I sigh?
No, rather smile away despair;
For those have been more sad than I,
With burthens more than I could bear;
Aye, gone rejoicing under care...

Never am I so alone
As when I walk among the crowd -
Blurred masks of stern or grinning stone,
Unmeaning eyes and voices loud.

Gaze dares not encounter gaze, ...
Humbled, I turn my head aside;...

In the nook of a wood where a pool freshed with dew
Glassed, daybreak till evening, blue sky glimpsing through
Then a star; or a slip of May-moon silver-white,
Thridding softly aloof the quiet of night,...

Come list, while I tell of the heart-wounded Stranger
Who sleeps her last slumber in this haunted ground;
Where often, at midnight, the lonely wood-ranger
Hears soft fairy music re-echo around.
...

"Now what is that, my daughter dear, upon thy cheek so fair?"
"'Tis but a kiss, my mother dear - kind fortune sent it there.
It was a courteous stranger-man that gave it unto me,...

The strangest things and the maddest things, that a man can do or say,
To the chaps and fellers and coves Out Back are matters of every day;...

O my trade it is the rarest one,
Simple shepherds all -
My trade is a sight to see;
For my customers I tie, and take 'em up on high,
And waft 'em to a far countree!

My tools are but common ones,...

Way up at the top of a big stack of straw
Was the cunningest parlor that ever you saw!
And there could you lie when aweary of play
And gossip or laze in the coziest way;...

Faster, faster,
O Circe, Goddess,
Let the wild, thronging train
The bright procession
Of eddying forms,
Sweep through my soul!
Thou standest, smiling
Down on me! thy right arm,...

We had finished our pitiful morsel,
And both sat in silence a while;
At length we looked up at each other.
And I said, with the ghost of a smile, -
"Only two little potatoes...

O stream descending to the sea,
Thy mossy banks between,
The flow'rets blow, the grasses grow,
The leafy trees are green.

In garden plots the children play,
The fields the labourers till,...