[The fact to which the following verses refer, is related by Dr. Edward Clarke in his Travels.] Blue sunny skies above; below,A blue and sunny sea;A world of blue, wherein did blowOne soft wind steadily. In great and solemn heaves, the massOf pulsing ocean beat,Unwrinkled as the sea of glassBeneath the holy feet. With forward […]

To G.E.M. ‘Tis a little room, my friend;A baby-walk from end to end;All the things look sadly real,This hot noontide’s Unideal.Seek not refuge at the casement,There’s no pasture for amazementBut a house most dim and rusty,And a street most dry and dusty;Seldom here more happy visionThan water-cart’s blest apparition,We’ll shut out the staring space,Draw the […]

All sights and sounds of every year,All groups and forms, each leaf and gem,Are thine, O God, nor need I fearTo speak to Thee of them. Too great thy heart is to despise;Thy day girds centuries about;From things which we count small, thine eyesSee great things looking out. Therefore this prayerful song I singMay come […]

Away from the city’s herds!Away from the noisy street!Away from the storm of words,Where hateful and hating meet! Away from the vapour grey,That like a boding of illIs blotting the morning gay,And gathers and darkens still! Away from the stupid book!For, like the fog’s weary rest,With anger dull it fills each nookOf my aching and […]

CHAPTER I. Once upon a time, the Queen of Fairyland, finding her own subjects far too well-behaved to be amusing, took a sudden longing to have a mortal or two at her Court. So, after looking about her for some time, she fixed upon two to bring to Fairyland. But how were they to be […]

It was a dull evening in November. A drizzling mist had been falling all day about the old farm. Harry Heywood and his two sisters sat in the house-place, expecting a visit from their uncle, Cornelius Heywood. This uncle lived alone, occupying the first floor above a chemist’s shop in the town, and had just […]

Among the young men assembled at the University of Prague, in the year 159–, was one called Karl von Wolkenlicht. A somewhat careless student, he yet held a fair position in the estimation of both professors and men, because he could hardly look at a proposition without understanding it. Where such proposition, however, had to […]

Hector Macintosh was a young man about five-and-twenty, who, with the proclivities of the Celt, inherited also some of the consequent disabilities, as well as some that were accidental. Among the rest was a strong tendency to regard only the ideal, and turn away from any authority derived from an inferior source. His chief delight […]

Elsie Scott had let her work fall on her knees, and her hands on her work, and was looking out of the wide, low window of her room, which was on one of the ground floors of the village street. Through a gap in the household shrubbery of fuchsias and myrtles filling the window-sill, one […]

On the top of a high cliff, forming part of the base of a great mountain, stood a lofty castle. When or how it was built, no man knew; nor could any one pretend to understand its architecture. Every one who looked upon it felt that it was lordly and noble; and where one part […]

One evening-twilight in spring, a young English student, who had wandered northwards as far as the outlying fragments of Scotland called the Orkney and Shetland Islands, found himself on a small island of the latter group, caught in a storm of wind and hail, which had come on suddenly. It was in vain to look […]

The eyes of three, two sisters and a brother, gazed for the last time on a great pale-golden star, that followed the sun down the steep west. It went down to arise again; and the brother about to depart might return, but more than the usual doubt hung upon his future. For between the white […]

I. If Thou hadst been a sculptor, what a raceOf forms divine had ever preached to men!Lo, I behold thy brow, all glorious then,(Its reflex dawning on the statue’s face)Bringing its Thought to birth in human grace,The soul of the grand form, upstarting, whenThou openest thus thy mysteries to our ken,Striking a marble window through […]

A Symbol. [Sidenote: He looks from his window on the midnight town.] ‘Tis the midnight hour; I heardThe city clocks give out the word.Seldom are the lamp-rays shedOn the quick foot-farer’s head,As I sit at my window old,Looking out into the cold,Down along the narrowing streetStretching out below my feet,From base of this primeval block,My […]

(Exodus XXXIII. 18-23.) “I do beseech Thee, God, show me thy face.”“Come up to me in Sinai on the morn:Thou shalt behold as much as may be borne.”And Moses on a rock stood lone in space.From Sinai’s top, the vaporous, thunderous place,God passed in clouds, an earthly garment wornTo hide, and thus reveal. In love, […]

And there I found him whom I went to find,A man of noble make and head uplift,Of equal carriage, Nature’s bounteous gift;For in no shelter had his generous mindGrown flowers that need the winds, rough not unkind.The joiner’s bench taught him, with judgment swift,Seen things to fashion, unseen things to sift;From all his face a […]

I went to listen to my teacher friend.O Friend above, thanks for the friend below!Who having been made wise, deep things to know,With brooding spirit over them doth bend,Until they waken words, as wings, to sendTheir seeds far forth, seeking a place to grow.The lesson past, with quiet foot I go,And towards his silent room, […]

I, strengthened, left him. Next in a close place,Mid houses crowded, dingy, barred, and high,Where men live not except to sell and buy,To me, leaving a doorway, came a grace.(Surely from heaven she came, though all that raceWalketh on human feet beneath the sky.)I, going on, beheld not who was nigh,When a sweet girl looked […]

I dreamed of a song, I heard it sung;In the ear that sleeps not its music rung.And the tones were upheld by harmonies deep,Where the spirit floated; yea, soared, on their sweepWith each wild unearthly word and tone,Upward, it knew not whither bound,In a calm delirium of mystic sound–Up, where the Genius of Thought aloneLoveth […]

The weary Old Year is dead at last;His corpse ‘mid the ruins of Time is cast,Where the mouldering wrecks of lost Thought lie,And the rich-hued blossoms of Passion dieTo a withering grass that droops o’er his grave,The shadowy Titan’s refuge cave.Strange lights from pale moony Memory lieOn the weedy columns beneath its eye;And strange is […]