English

When I'm on a long, long “bye,”
'Neath a foreign rooftree resting,
Thoughts like swallows homeward fly
To the niche where you are nesting.

Then I wish I worked in sounds—
Words at best have limitations:
Music sets no metes and bounds
To the heart's communications.

Music's language could I reach,
I should write some pensive measures
Telling what our English speech
Cannot tell, for all its treasures.

Solemnly the Senior Class
Moves the aisle adown.
Stand up, Bab! Watch sister pass
In her cap and gown!

Once she was as small as you,
With as much to know.
I wrote ballads for her, too—
Long, oh, long ago.

She was once, like you, a fay,
Come with us to dwell,
But she vanished quite one day;
Whither—who can tell?

Some day you will take your flight
From the elfin bough:
Ah, if I could hold you tight,
As I hold you now!

But you'll dance away from me,
Faery aisles adown;

She told her love, and her sorrow woke
With a pang renewed at each word she spoke.
But Yusuf looked not upon her: in dread
He lowered his eyes and he bent his head.
As he looked on the ground in a whirl of thought
He saw his own form on the carpet wrought,
Where a bed was figured of silk and brocade,
And himself by the side of Zulaikha laid.
From the pictured carpet he looked in quest
Of a spot where his eye might, untroubled, rest.
He looked on the wall, on the door; the pair
Of rose-lipped lovers was painted there.

May has come in—young May, the beautiful—
Wearing the sweetest chaplet of the year.
Along the eastern corridors she walks,
What time the clover rocks the earliest bee,
Her feet a-flush with sunrise, and her veil
Floating in breezy odours o'er her hair;
And ample garments, fluttering at the hem,
With pleasing rustle round her sandal shoon.
What happy voices wake the rural airs,
From hillside homes and valley cottages.
And every village is alive at dawn!
Long ere the dews have winged themselves to heaven,

The spring departs; and, in her speeding haste,
Chased by a swarm of murmuring winds and bees.
Scatters the withered lilacs as she flies.
The blue bird mourns for her; the russet wren
Leads out its young, to see her ere she leaves.
Her hands are full of garlands, some a-bloom,
Some budding and some dead. With floating hair,
Thus fled Ophelia in her frenzied hour;
And, like Ophelia, from her willow branch,
Spring, singing, falls into the lilied pool,
And in the crystal stream of summer drowns.
The heavens a little weep above her form,

But this is past, and dies the cloudless day.
How solemnly and calm the evening falls
Around the rural scene! One burning bar
Along the shadowy western hill-top flames,
And, like the blazing iron upon an anvil,
Sinks to a cooler red, and darkly fades,
Leaving the vale to twilight. Charmed hour!
Now fall the dews, of which the blossoms drink
Deep opiate draughts, till, nodding on their stems,
Within their scented mantles folded close,
They dream till morn. The sounds of day are done
Innumerous tongues, which only wake at eve,

Let us descend afar the summer road,
And note how in the crowded mart is kept
The sacred day. Along the harvest fields.
Throughout the stretching valley, smokes the air
With a long line of the impending dust,
Sultry and thick, until the Sunday garb
Of smoothest black becomes a suit of grey,
And the deep standing grain beside the road
Bows low with the collecting weight; while feet
Innumerous are plumping in the dust,
Deep as the fetlocks, as it were a snow;
And flying wheels fling from their tires and spokes

Here, stranger, stay! This is the sacred spot
Which knew the patriots in the years agone.
Here trod the noblest form the land has known;
Here swelled the stateliest soul e'er form has held;
And here—nor here alone, but round the world,
And throughout heaven—my faith will have it so—
The name most loved is spoken, and rolls on
Revered by freemen, and by angels breathed,
And trembling oft upon the lips of slaves,
Brightening their dream of hope. Still to our hearts
Let the great name of Washington be dear;

Behold the river, wide, respiring, vast,
Swelling and falling, answering to the main.
Here rise and sink the multitudinous ships,
Swaying in slumberous ease, where every flag
Known to a Christian sky salutes the air.
How the brown cordage like a net-work spreads,
A monster web entangling leafless pines!
From this same wharf, down dropping with the tide,
Went Arthur, when he bade his last adieu—
While the great bay, as usherer to the sea,
Unto the ocean's awful presence led—
There stands the maid in secret musing held,

When I recount the pleasant sights of earth—
Fair childhood blowing bubbles in the sun—
A pleasure party, in a moonlit barque;
The little sail with breeze and music swelled—
A dancing wreath of children crowning May—
A bridal group across a distant field
Returning, with gay footsteps, from the church—
I can recall no brighter, nobler scene,
Than men at labour mid the waving grain,
When summer, with its alchemy, transmutes
The crops from green to gold! The harvest sun
Burns broad and white above the yellowing world,