We sing "Our Country's" song to-night With saddened voice and eye; Her banner droops in clouded light Beneath the wintry sky. We'll pledge her once in golden wine...
Once more Orion and the sister Seven Look on thee from the skies that hailed thy birth, - How shall we welcome thee, whose home was heaven, From thy celestial wanderings back to earth? ...
Winter's cold drift lies glistening o'er his breast; For him no spring shall bid the leaf unfold What Love could speak, by sudden grief oppressed, What swiftly summoned Memory tell, is told. ...
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....
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. ...
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?
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. ...
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! ...
'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,...
Once more, ye sacred towers, Your solemn dirges sound; Strew, loving hands, the April flowers, Once more to deck his mound. A nation mourns its dead, Its sorrowing voices one,...
Not with the anguish of hearts that are breaking Come we as mourners to weep for our dead; Grief in our breasts has grown weary of aching, Green is the turf where our tears we have shed. ...
Behold the shape our eyes have known! It lives once more in changeless stone; So looked in mortal face and form Our guide through peril's deadly storm.