Other harvests there are than those that lie
Glowing and ripe 'neath an autumn sky,
    Awaiting the sickle keen,
Harvests more precious than golden grain,
Waving o'er hillside, valley or plain,
    Than fruits 'mid their leafy screen.

Not alone for the preacher, man of God,
Do those harvests vast enrich the sod,
    For all may the sickle wield;
The first in proud ambition's race,
The last in talent, power or place,
    Will all find work in that field.

Man toiling, lab'ring with fevered strain,
High office or golden prize to gain,
    Rest both weary heart and head,
And think, when thou'lt shudder in death's cold clasp,
How earthly things will elude thy grasp,
    At that harvest work instead!

Lady, with queenly form and brow,

A gift of Silence, sweet!
Who may not ever hear:
To lay down at your unobservant feet,
Is all the gift I bear.

I have no songs to sing,
That you should heed or know:
I have no lilies, in full hands, to fling
Across the path you go.

I cast my flowers away,
Blossoms unmeet for you!
The garland I have gathered in my day:
My rosemary and rue.

I watch you pass and pass,
Serene and cold: I lay
My lips upon your trodden, daisied grass,
And turn my life away.

Yea, for I cast you, sweet!
This one gift, you shall take:
Like ointment, on your unobservant feet,
My silence, for your sake.

When life begins anew,
And Youth, from gathering flowers,
From vague delights, rapt musings, twilight hours,
Turns restless, seeking some great deed to do,
To sum his foster'd dreams; when that fresh birth
Unveils the real, the throng'd and spacious Earth,
And he awakes to those more ample skies,
By other aims and by new powers possess'd:
How deeply, then, his breast
Is fill'd with pangs of longing! how his eyes
Drink in the enchanted prospect! Fair it lies
Before him, with its plains expanding vast,
Peopled with visions, and enrich'd with dreams;
Dim cities, ancient forests, winding streams,
Places resounding in the famous past,
A kingdom ready to his hand!
How like a bride Life seems to stand
In welcome, and with festal robes array'd!
He feels her ...

See in the babe two loveliest flowers united yet in truth,
While in the bud they seem the same the virgin and the youth!
But loosened is the gentle bond, no longer side by side
From holy shame the fiery strength will soon itself divide.
Permit the youth to sport, and still the wild desire to chase,
For, but when sated, weary strength returns to seek the grace.
Yet in the bud, the double flowers the future strife begin,
How precious all yet naught can still the longing heart within.
In ripening charms the virgin bloom to woman shape hath grown,
But round the ripening charms the pride hath clasped its guardian zone;
Shy, as before the hunter's horn the doe all trembling moves,
She flies from man as from a foe, and hates before she loves!

From lowering brows this struggling wo...

A soul immortal, Time, God everywhere,
Without, within -how can a heart despair,
Or talk of failure, obstacles, and doubt?
(What proofs of God?    The little seeds that sprout,
Life, and the solar system, and their laws.
Nature?    Ah, yes; but what was Nature's cause?)

All mighty words are short:    God, life, and death,
War, peace, and truth, are uttered in a breath.
And briefly said are love, and will, and time;
Yet in them lies a majesty sublime.

Love is the vast constructive power of space;
Time is the hour which calls it into place;
Will is the means of using time and love,
And bringing forth the heart's desires thereof.

The way is love, the time is now, and will
The patient method.    Let this knowledge fill
Thy consciousness, and fate...

I’ve a kiss from a warmer lover
Than maiden earth can be:
She blew it up to the skies above her,
And now it has come to me;
From the far-away it has come today
With a breath of the old salt sea.

She lay and laughed on a lazy billow,
Far away on the deep,
Who had gathered the froth for my lady’s pillow
Gathered a sparkling heap;
And the ocean’s cry was the lullaby
That cradled my love to sleep.

Far away on the blue Pacific
There doth my lady roam,
That is oft-times gay, but as oft terrific:
Her jewels are beads of foam:
In a coral cave, where a blue-green wave
Keeps guard, is my lady’s home.

She claps her hands, and her henchman hurries
West of the sunset sheen:
’Tis he who comes when a mist-wrack scurries,
Skirting th...

Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon,
With the old moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.

Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.

I

Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming-on of rain...

When my heart was sad and lonely,
    And had closed its inmost cell
Over the impulsive feelings
    That rule my nation's hearts too well.

When the tie was cut asunder,
    That had bound me to a home,
And I felt the desolation
    Of being in the world alone;

When I first, the veil assuming,
    Masked before a treacherous world,
And the hopes romance expanded
    Reality had sternly furled;

And the touch of disappointment,
    Blighted what was green and fair,
And the spirit's bright revealings
    Are not so hopeful as they were.

Precious are the words of kindness,
    Falling on the heart like dew,
Freshening though, alas for weakness,
    They cannot make things new.

Thoughts come warm from that deep foun...

I.

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gypsy, will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gypsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

II.

"You cannot eat your cake and have it too."
- Proverb.


How fever'd is the man, who cannot look
Upon his mortal day...

O your hands - they are strangely fair!
Fair - for the jewels that sparkle there, -
Fair - for the witchery of the spell
That ivory keys alone can tell;
But when their delicate touches rest
Here in my own do I love them best,
As I clasp with eager acquisitive spans
My glorious treasure of beautiful hands!

Marvelous - wonderful - beautiful hands!
They can coax roses to bloom in the strands
Of your brown tresses; and ribbons will twine.
Under mysterious touches of thine,
Into such knots as entangle the soul,
And fetter the heart under such a control
As only the strength of my love understands -
My passionate love for your beautiful hands.

As I remember the first fair touch
Of those beautiful hands that I love so much,
I seem to thrill as I ...

Sing, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,
The grand, austere, imperial utterance.
Which drives my soul before it back to days
In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high
Past broken hills, and when the polar gale
Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath
That speaks for ever of the White South Land
Alone with God and Silence in the cold,
I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss,

A story shining with a woman’s love!
And who that knows that love can ever doubt
How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;
For while th...

I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!

For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.

She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.

Yet lived, wrought, suffered. Lo, the pictured token
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?

She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies, -
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.

Twin-souled she seemed,...

The touches of her hands are like the fall
    Of velvet snowflakes; like the touch of down
The peach just brushes 'gainst the garden wall;
The flossy fondlings of the thistle-wisp
    Caught in the crinkle of a leaf of brown
The blighting frost hath turned from green to crisp.

Soft as the falling of the dusk at night,
The touches of her hands, and the delight -
    The touches of her hands!
The touches of her hands are like the dew
That falls so softly down no one e'er knew
The touch thereof save lovers like to one
Astray in lights where ranged Endymion.

O rarely soft, the touches of her hands,
As drowsy zephyrs in enchanted lands;
    Or pulse of dying fay; or fairy sighs,
Or - in between the midnight and the dawn,
When long unrest and tears...

Female Beauty at Venice.--No longer what it was in the time of Titian.-- His mistress.--Various Forms in which he has painted her.--Venus.--Divine and profane Love.--La Fragilita d'Amore--Paul Veronese.--His Women.-- Marriage of Cana.--Character of Italian Beauty.--Raphael's Fornarina.-- Modesty.


Thy brave, thy learned have passed away:
Thy beautiful!--ah, where are they?
The forms, the faces that once shone,
    Models of grace, in Titian's eye,
Where are they now, while flowers live on
    In ruined places, why, oh! why
    Must Beauty thus with Glory die?
That maid whose lips would still have moved,
    Could art have breathed a spirit through them;
Whose varying charms her artist loved
    More fondly every time he drew them,
(So oft beneath his touch they ...

Far from "where the roses rest",
Round the altar and the aisle,
Which I loved, of all, the best --
I have come to rest awhile
By the ever-restless sea --
Will its waves give rest to me?

But it is so hard to part
With my roses. Do they know
(Who knows but each has a heart?)
How it grieves my heart to go?
Roses! will the restless sea
Bring, as ye, a rest for me?

Ye were sweet and still and calm,
Roses red and roses white;
And ye sang a soundless psalm
For me in the day and night.
Roses! will the restless sea
Sing as sweet as ye for me?

Just a hundred feet away,
Seaward, flows and ebbs the tide;
And the wavelets, blue and gray,
Moan, and white sails windward glide
O'er the ever restless sea
From me, far and pea...

And in Life's noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.


You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulses beat ;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

How good it is, when overwrought,
To seek the woods and find a thought,
That to the soul's attentive sense
Delivers much in evidence
Of truths for which man long has sought
Truths, which no vulture years contrive
To rob the heart of, holding it
To all the glory infinite
Of beauty that shall aye survive.
Still shall it lure us. Year by year
Addressing now the spirit ear
With thoughts, and now the spirit eye
With visions that like gods go by,
Filling the mind with bliss and fear
In spite of modern man who mocks
The Loveliness of old, nor minds
The ancient myths, gone with the winds,
And dreams that people woods and rocks.

My senses ofttimes are oppress'd,

Oft stagnant is my blood;
But when by Christel's sight I'm blest,

I feel my strength renew'd.
I see her here, I see her there,

And really cannot tell
The manner how, the when, the where,

The why I love her well.

If with the merest glance I view

Her black and roguish eyes,
And gaze on her black eyebrows too,

My spirit upward flies.
Has any one a mouth so sweet,

Such love-round cheeks as she?
Ah, when the eye her beauties meet,

It ne'er content can be.

And when in airy German dance

I clasp her form divine,
So quick we whirl, so quick advance,

What rapture then like mine!
And when she's giddy, and feels warm,

I cradle her, poor ...