We wagered, she for sunshine, I for rain, And I should hint sharp practice if I dared; For was not she beforehand sure to gain Who made the sunshine we together shared?

It was past the hour of trysting, But she lingered for him still; Like a child, the eager streamlet Leaped and laughed adown the hill, Happy to be free at twilight From its toiling at the mill. Then the great moon on a sudden Ominous, and red as blood, Startling as a new creation, O’er […]

“What means this glory round our feet,” The Magi mused, “more bright than morn?” And voices chanted clear and sweet, “To-day the Prince of Peace is born!” “What means that star,” the Shepherds said, “That brightens through the rocky glen?” And angels, answering overhead, Sang, “Peace on earth, good-will to men!” ‘Tis eighteen hundred years […]

As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new, and near the end The milestones into headstones change, ‘Neath every one a friend.

In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.

What know we of the world immense Beyond the narrow ring of sense? What should we know, who lounge about The house we dwell in, nor find out, Masked by a wall, the secret cell Where the soul’s priests in hiding dwell? The winding stair that steals aloof To chapel-mysteries ‘neath the roof? It lies […]

UNDER A FIGURE SYMBOLIZING THE CHURCH Thou wast the fairest of all man-made things; The breath of heaven bore up thy cloudy wings, And, patient in their triple rank, The thunders crouched about thy flank, Their black lips silent with the doom of kings. The storm-wind loved to rock him in thy pines, And swell […]

Stood the tall Archangel weighing All man’s dreaming, doing, saying, All the failure and the pain, All the triumph and the gain, In the unimagined years, Full of hopes, more full of tears, Since old Adam’s hopeless eyes Backward searched for Paradise, And, instead, the flame-blade saw Of inexorable Law. Waking, I beheld him there, […]

On this wild waste, where never blossom came, Save the white wind-flower to the billow’s cap, Or those pale disks of momentary flame, Loose petals dropped from Dian’s careless lap, What far fetched influence all my fancy fills, With singing birds and dancing daffodils? Why, ’tis her day whom jocund April brought, And who brings […]

If he be a nobler lover, take him! You in you I seek, and not myself; Love with men’s what women choose to make him, Seraph strong to soar, or fawn-eyed elf: All I am or can, your beauty gave it, Lifting me a moment nigh to you, And my bit of heaven, I fain […]

VERSES, INTENDED TO GO WITH A POSSET DISH TO MY DEAR LITTLE GODDAUGHTER, 1882 In good old times, which means, you know, The time men wasted long ago, And we must blame our brains or mood If that we squander seems less good, In those blest days when wish was act And fancy dreamed itself […]

Strong, simple, silent are the [steadfast] laws That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man’s outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good; And when the Fates ally them with a cause That wallows in the sea-trough and seems lost, Drifting in danger of the reefs and sands Of […]

1858 There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence […]

1860 While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and changes that bear with furtherance or […]

1861 We do not believe that any government–no, not the Rump Parliament on its last legs–ever showed such pitiful inadequacy as our own during the past two months. Helpless beyond measure in all the duties of practical statesmanship, its members or their dependants have given proof of remarkable energy in the single department of peculation; […]

1861 Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been thought a madman. Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we now see and […]

1864 We can conceive of no object capable of rousing deeper sympathy than a defeated commander. Though the first movement of popular feeling may be one of wrathful injustice, yet, when the ebb of depression has once fairly run out, and confidence begins to set back, hiding again that muddy bed of human nature which […]

1864 In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest, which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either […]

1864 The spectacle of an opposition waiting patiently during several months for its principles to turn up would be amusing in times less critical than these. Nor was this the worst. If there might be persons malicious enough to think that the Democratic party could get along very well without principles, all would admit that […]

1865 In the glare of our civil war, certain truths, hitherto unobserved or guessed at merely, have been brought out with extraordinary sharpness of relief; and two of them have been specially impressive, the one for European observers, the other for ourselves. The first, and perhaps the most startling to the Old World watcher of […]