Works

Wind and sea and cloud and cloud-forsaking
Mirth of moonlight where the storm leaves free
Heaven awhile, for all the wrath of waking
Wind and sea.

Bright with glad mad rapture, fierce with glee,...

Open the window, and let the air
Freshly blow upon face and hair,
And fill the room, as it fills the night,
With the breath of the rain's sweet might.
Hark! the burthen, swift and prone!...

The lights have faded from the little casement,
As though her closing eyes had brought on night;
And now she dreams--Ah! dreams supremely bright,
While silence reigns around from roof to basement....

Let this rough fragment lend its mossy seat;
Let Contemplation hail this lone retreat:
Come, meek-eyed goddess, through the midnight gloom,
Born of the silent awe which robes the tomb!...

Lo! where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny;
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly
How bright her mien!
...

How oft a cloud, with envious veil,
Obscures yon bashful light,
Which seems so modestly to steal
Along the waste of night!

'Tis thus the world's obtrusive wrongs
Obscure with malice keen...

I

It is not early spring and yet
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
And blotted banks of violet,
My heart will dream.

Is it because the windflower apes...

I.

Three times thrice hath winter's rough white wing
Crossed and curdled wells and streams with ice
Since his birth whose praises love would sing
Three times thrice.
...

Mighty Thomas, a solemn senatus[1] I call,
To consult for Sapphira;[2] so come one and all;
Quit books, and quit business, your cure and your care,
For a long winding walk, and a short bill of fare....

Loud complaints being made in these quick-reading times,
Of too slack a supply both of prose works and rhymes,
A new Company, formed on the keep-moving plan,
First proposed by the great firm of Catch-'em-who-can,...

When erst, my Southey, thy tuneful tongue
The terrible tale of Thalaba sung--
Of him, the Destroyer, doomed to rout
That grim divan of conjurors out,
Whose dwelling dark, as legends say,...

The Text is from a broadside of the seventeenth century from the press of Coles, Vere, Wright, and Clarke, now preserved in the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian Library.

...

There is a power whose inspiration fills
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught...

Is it the Spring?
Or are the birds all wrong
That play on flute and viol,
A thousand strong,
In minstrel galleries
Of the long deep wood,
Epiphanies
Of bloom and bud.
...

While from our looks, fair nymph, you guess
The secret passions of our mind;
My heavy eyes, you say, confess
A heart to love and grief inclined.

There needs, alas! but little art...

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;...

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze...

My wife contrived a fleecy thing
Her husband to infold,
For 'tis the pride of woman still
To cover from the cold:
My daughter made it a new text
For a sermon very old.
...

Everything goes to its rest;
The hills are asleep in the noon;
And life is as still in its nest
As the moon when she looks on a moon
In the depth of a calm river's breast...

The dinner-bell, the dinner-bell
Is ringing loud and clear;
Through hill and plain, through street and lane,
It echoes far and near;
From curtained hall and whitewashed stall,
Wherever men can hide,...