In noon-tide hours, O Love, secure and strong,
I need thee not; mad dreams are mine to bind
The world to my desire, and hold the wind
A voiceless captive to my conquering song.
I need thee not, I am content with these:
Keep silence in thy soul, beyond the seas!

But in the desolate hour of midnight, when
An ectasy of starry silence sleeps
And my soul hungers for thy voice, O then,
Love, like the magic of wild melodies,
Let thy soul answer mine across the seas.

ALL the flight of thoughts here, shy, bold, scared, intrusive,
Fluttering in the sun, between the green and blue,
Wheeling, whirling, poising, lovely and elusive,
How to cage the flying thoughts, my winged delight, for you?

Set a springe of rhyme, and hope to catch them in it?
Strew my love as grain to lure them to the snare?
Watch the hours built up, slow minute piled on minute?
Still the wide sky guards their flight, and still the cage is bare.

Gleam of hovering feathers, brushing me to flout me!

Care is a Poet fine:
He works in shade or shine,
And leaves, you know his sign!
No day without its line.

He writes with iron pen
Upon the brows of men;
Faint lines at first, and then
He scores them in again.

His touch at first is light
On Beauty's brow of white;
The old churl loves to write
On foreheads broad and bright.

A line for young love crossed,
A line for fair hopes lost
In an untimely frost,
A line that means Thou Wast.

Then deeper script appears:
The furrows of dim fears,

CARE is a Poet fine:
He works in shade or shine,
And leaves—you know his sign!—
No day without its line.

He writes with iron pen
Upon the brows of men;
Faint lines at first, and then
He scores them in again.

His touch at first is light
On Beauty’s brow of white;
The old churl loves to write
On foreheads broad and bright.

A line for young love crossed,
A line for fair hopes lost
In an untimely frost—
A line that means Thou Wast.

Then deeper script appears:
The furrows of dim fears,

How's a man to write a sonnet, can you tell,--
How's he going to weave the dim, poetic spell,--
When a-toddling on the floor
Is the muse he must adore,
And this muse he loves, not wisely, but too well?

Now, to write a sonnet, every one allows,
One must always be as quiet as a mouse;
But to write one seems to me
Quite superfluous to be,
When you 've got a little sonnet in the house.

Just a dainty little poem, true and fine,
That is full of love and life in every line,
Earnest, delicate, and sweet,
Altogether so complete

I do not care for kisses. 'Tis a debt
We paid for the first privilege of love.
These are the rains of April which have wet
Our fallow hearts and forced their germs to move.
Now the green corn has sprouted. Each new day
Brings better pleasures, a more dear surprise,
The blade, the ear, the harvest--and our way
Leads through a region wealthy grown and wise.
We now compare our fortunes. Each his store
Displays to kindred eyes of garnered grain,
Two happy farmers, learned in love's lore,
Who weigh and touch and argue and complain--

Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou, shrieking harbinger,
Foul pre-currer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-defying swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou, treble-dated crow,

DEAREST, a look is but a ray
Reflected in a certain way;
A word, whatever tone it wear,
Is but a trembling wave of air;
A touch, obedience to a clause
In nature's pure material laws.

The very flowers that bend and meet,
In sweetening others, grow more sweet;
The clouds by day, the stars by night,
Inweave their floating locks of light;
The rainbow, Heaven's own forehead's braid,
Is but the embrace of sun and shade.

Oh! in the hour when I shall feel
Those shadows round my senses steal,
When gentle eyes are weeping o'er

He loved the brook's soft sound,
The swallow swimming by.
He loved the daisy-covered ground,
The cloud-bedappled sky.
To him the dismal storm appeared
The very voice of God;
And when the evening rack was reared
Stood Moses with his rod.
And everything his eyes surveyed,
The insects in the brake,
Were creatures God Almighty made,
He loved them for His sake--
A silent man in life's affairs,
A thinker from a boy,
A peasant in his daily cares,
A poet in his joy.

The Kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man,
seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one,
sold all that he had and bought it.—Matthew 13.45


I know the ways of Learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forced by fire;
Both th' old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history: