Up came the young Centaur-colts from the plains they were fathered in,
Curious, awkward, afraid.
Burrs on their hocks and their tails, they were branded and gathered in
Mobs and run up to the yard to be made.

Starting and shying at straws, with sidlings and plungings,
Buckings and whirlings and bolts;
Greener than grass, but full-ripe for their bridling and lungings,
Up to the yards and to Chiron they bustled the colts...

First the light web and the cavesson; then the linked keys
To jingle and turn on the tongue. Then, with cocked ears,
The hours of watching and envy, while comrades at ease
Passaged and backed, making naught of these terrible gears.

Next, over-pride and its price at the low-seeming fence
Too oft and too easily taken, the world-beheld fall!<...

    From top to pedestal you scan it lightly -
    Capped head to lettered base - and you are smiling.
    What see you there to set your lips a-quiver?
    An awkward figure cut from ugly granite,
    Aye, roughly hewn, as if unhelped by chisel,
    This peaceful man of war, sculptured grotesquely.
    Still - there is metal in the gun he is holding,
    And in the cannon balls piled up before him -
    The artist's symbols of a real soldier.
    Yet jeer no longer!
    Before you is a soldier of the Union,
    Crowned with the tears and prayers of many mourners.
    The Village set him here for all to honor,
    Here, in the centre of their foot-worn common,
    Where on long, summer evenings boys at baseball
    May gaze and gaze, and make him an example;
 ...

    Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;
    Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;
    Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant.

Give me to live and love in the old, bold fashion;
A soldier's billet at night and a soldier's ration;
A heart that leaps to the fight with a soldier's passion.

For I hold as a simple faith there's no denying:
The trade of a soldier's the only trade worth plying;
The death of a soldier's the only death worth dying.

So let me go and leave your safety behind me;
Go to the spaces of hazard where nothing shall bind me;
Go till the word is War - and then you will find me.

Then you will call me and claim me because you will need me;
Cheer me and gird me and into the battle-wrath speed me...

Yes, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom,
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of timid,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumph...

When we had passed the threshold of the gate
(Which the soul's ill affection doth disuse,
Making the crooked seem the straighter path),
I heard its closing sound. Had mine eyes turn'd,
For that offence what plea might have avail'd?

We mounted up the riven rock, that wound
On either side alternate, as the wave
Flies and advances. "Here some little art
Behooves us," said my leader, "that our steps
Observe the varying flexure of the path."

Thus we so slowly sped, that with cleft orb
The moon once more o'erhangs her wat'ry couch,
Ere we that strait have threaded. But when free
We came and open, where the mount above
One solid mass retires, I spent, with toil,
And both, uncertain of the way, we stood,
Upon a plain more lonesome, than the roads
That...

Oh! best belov'd of heaven, on earth bestow'd
To raise the pilgrim, sunk with ghastly fears,
To cool his burning wounds, to wipe his tears,
And strew with amaranths his thorny road.
Alas! how long has superstition hurl'd
Thine altars down, thine attributes revil'd,
The hearts of men with witchcrafts foul beguil'd,
And spread his empire o'er the vassal world?
But truth returns! she spreads resistless day;
And mark, the monster's cloud-wrapt fabric falls--
He shrinks--he trembles 'mid his inmost halls,
And all his damn'd illusions melt away!
The charm dissolv'd--immortal, fair, and free,
Thy holy fanes shall rise, celestial Charity!

Bide thi time! it's sure to come,
Tho' it may seem tardy, -
Thine's a better fate nor some:
If tha's but a humble home,
Yet thart strong an hardy;
Then cheer up an ne'er repine,
Be content, an bide thi time.

Bide thi time! if fortun's blind,
Rail not at her givin;
If tha thinks shoo's ovver kind
To thi neighbor, nivver mind,
If tha gets a livin;
Woll thi life is in its prime,
Be content, an bide thi time.

Bide thi time! for ther's a endin
To a loin, haivver long:
Things at th' warst mun start o' mendin;
Ther's noa wind but what's befriendin
One or other, tho' its strong:
Remember, poverty's noa crime -
Be content, an bide thi time.

Bide thi time! tho none are near thee
To stretch out a helpin hand;
Let noa d...

There has been many a grander deed since man had life to give,
And thousands have gone to certain death, eyes open, that men might live;
And many have gone for their country’s sake, when their numbers were all too few,
And bravely died that their mates may die, to show what a man can do.

Now this is the song of La Bella wreck at the harbour of Warnambool,
And this is the song of a brave, brave man of the grand old simple school:
We all know the forces of circumstance, and we blame not the lifeboat crew,
But this is the song of a fisherman who showed what a man can do.

With a single scull in his strong young hands, and his brave young eyes aglow,
He shot his skill o’er the raging hell, where the lifeboat dared not go!
It was twice and thrice that he went again, and the lives the...

An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.

A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.

[1]

To Madame De La Sablière.[2]

A temple I reserved you in my rhyme:
It might not be completed but with time.
Already its endurance I had grounded
Upon this charming art, divinely founded;
And on the name of that divinity
For whom its adoration was to be.
These words I should have written o'er its gate -
TO IRIS IS THIS PALACE CONSECRATE;
Not her who served the queen divine;
For Juno's self, and he who crown'd her bliss,
Had thought it for their dignity, I wis,
To bear the messages of mine.
Within the dome the apotheosis
Should greet th' enraptured sight -
All heaven, in pomp and order meet,
Conducting Iris to her seat
Beneath a canopy of light!
The walls would amply serve to paint her life, -
A matter swe...

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand?

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self.

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

My theme pursuing, I relate that ere
We reach'd the lofty turret's base, our eyes
Its height ascended, where two cressets hung
We mark'd, and from afar another light
Return the signal, so remote, that scarce
The eye could catch its beam. I turning round
To the deep source of knowledge, thus inquir'd:
"Say what this means? and what that other light
In answer set? what agency doth this?"

"There on the filthy waters," he replied,
"E'en now what next awaits us mayst thou see,
If the marsh-gender'd fog conceal it not."

Never was arrow from the cord dismiss'd,
That ran its way so nimbly through the air,
As a small bark, that through the waves I spied
Toward us coming, under the sole sway
Of one that ferried it, who cried aloud:
"Art thou arriv'd, fe...

A face in the mist, with rain around,
clings to bare leaves frowning.
A face through the mist, convulsed,
plays stationary, perching from twigs.
A face, not knowing it, trust it is good.

Bertrand had been surprised by the recoil of his father's rifle. He had not prepared for the sight of the weasel pasted against the barn door, a dozen pellets alone penetrating its upper neck and mid-thorax region. A mass of blood and fur seemed to have been twisted onto the vicinity of the latch then held in place as if from afar by many bullet-like prongs. Surely, the calibre of the shotgun was too strong for his choice of game.

Bertrand had a tendency for overkill. Possessing a temperament and a super-charged imagination that demanded structure even when little existed naturally, his mania for organization had presented itself on innumerable occasions about the homestead. There had been the case of his clearing a brood of starlings from the drive house. A messy business, if you let it but from one Bertrand would not flinch. ...

The only sure friend of declining life

A Soliloquy



Unchanged within, to see all changed without,
Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt.
Yet why at others' Wanings should'st thou fret?
Then only might'st thou feel a just regret,
Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light
In selfish forethought of neglect and slight.
O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed,
While, and on whom, thou may'st, shine on! nor heed
Whether the object by reflected light
Return thy radiance or absorb it quite:
And tho' thou notest from thy safe recess
Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
Love them for what they are ; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were

True laureate of the Anglo-Saxon race,
Whose words have won the hearts of young and old;
So free from cant, and yet replete with grace,
Or prose or verse it glows like burnished gold;
Thy muse is ever loyal to the truth,
And those who know thee best forget thy youth.

Unbend thy bow and rest with us awhile;
Thy active mind requires a healthy brain;
Death's shadow has gone back upon the dial,
And thou art left a higher goal to gain;
The future will eclipse the brilliant past;
Fear not; thy ideal will be reached at last.

To do the grandest work one must needs be
Endowed by Nature for the master task;
Yea more, he must possess the light to see
Those mysteries which nature seems to mask,
And this can gain but in the royal way--
'Tis dread experienc...

No doubt but ye are the People-your throne is above the King's.
Whoso speaks in your presence must say acceptable things:
Bowing the head in worship, bending the knee in fear,
Bringing the word well smoothen-such as a King should hear.

Fenced by your careful fathers, ringed by your leaden seas,
Long did ye wake in quiet and long lie down at ease;
Till Ye said of Strife, "What is it?" of the Sword, "It is far from our ken";
Till ye made a sport of your shrunken hosts and a toy of your armed men.
Ye stopped your ears to the warning-ye would neither look nor heed,
Ye set your leisure before their toil and your lusts above their need.
Because of your witless learning and your beasts of warren and chase,
Ye grudged your sons to their service and your fields for their camping-place.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.