The feeble sea-birds, blinded in the storms, On some tall lighthouse dash their little forms, And the rude granite scatters for their pains Those small deposits that were meant for brains....
Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn, Blushing into life new-born! Lend me violets for my hair, And thy russet robe to wear, And thy ring of rosiest hue Set in drops of diamond dew! ...
Farewell, for the bark has her breast to the tide, And the rough arms of Ocean are stretched for his bride; The winds from the mountain stream over the bay; One clasp of the hand, then away and away! ...
It is a pity and a shame - alas! alas! I know it is, To tread the trodden grapes again, but so it has been, so it is; The purple vintage long is past, with ripened clusters bursting so...
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; ...
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.
All overgrown with bush and fern, And straggling clumps of tangled trees, With trunks that lean and boughs that turn, Bent eastward by the mastering breeze, -...
The mountains glitter in the snow A thousand leagues asunder; Yet here, amid the banquet's glow, I hear their voice of thunder; Each giant's ice-bound goblet clinks; A flowing stream is summoned;...
What makes the Healing Art divine? The bitter drug we buy and sell, The brands that scorch, the blades that shine, The scars we leave, the "cures" we tell?
I Enchanter of Erin, whose magic has bound us, Thy wand for one moment we fondly would claim, Entranced while it summons the phantoms around us That blush into life at the sound of thy name. ...
Afar he sleeps whose name is graven here, Where loving hearts his early doom deplore; Youth, promise, virtue, all that made him dear Heaven lent, earth borrowed, sorrowing to restore. ...
I believe that the copies of verses I've spun, Like Scheherezade's tales, are a thousand and one; You remember the story, - those mornings in bed, - 'T was the turn of a copper, - a tale or a head. ...
Land where the banners wave last in the sun, Blazoned with star-clusters, many in one, Floating o'er prairie and mountain and sea; Hark! 't is the voice of thy children to thee! ...
Fast as the rolling seasons bring The hour of fate to those we love, Each pearl that leaves the broken string Is set in Friendship's crown above. As narrower grows the earthly chain,...
Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming, Snatched from the altars of insolent foes, Burning with star-fires, but never consuming, Flash its broad ribbons of lily and rose. ...
'T is like stirring living embers when, at eighty, one remembers All the achings and the quakings of "the times that tried men's souls"; When I talk of Whig and Tory, when I tell the Rebel story,...