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? ...
She has gone, - she has left us in passion and pride, - Our stormy-browed sister, so long at our side! She has torn her own star from our firmament's glow, And turned on her brother the face of a foe! ...
If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea...
Yes, tyrants, you hate us, and fear while you hate The self-ruling, chain-breaking, throne-shaking State! The night-birds dread morning, - your instinct is true, - The day-star of Freedom brings midnight for you!...
It may be, yes, it must be, Time that brings An end to mortal things, That sends the beggar Winter in the train Of Autumn's burdened wain, - Time, that is heir of all our earthly state,...
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! ...
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; ...
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, -...
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. ...
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. ...
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,...