Minor Poems

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Little, Brown, 1878 - 396 pages

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Page 303 - He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again.
Page 167 - Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.
Page 125 - Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround — Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Page 138 - If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!
Page 165 - Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march, With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow ; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky : I pass through the pores of the oceail and shores ; I change, but I cannot die.
Page 65 - Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone ? Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? — Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river ; Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown •, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom ; why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency...
Page 170 - We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Page 330 - I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not, — The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?
Page 297 - Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless breast and burning brain That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive...
Page 293 - As Albion wails for thee : the curse of Cain Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

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