Welcome, Brazilian brother--thy ample place is ready; A loving hand--a smile from the north--a sunny instant hall! (Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles, impedimentas, Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance and the faith;) To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck--to thee from us the expectant eye, Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning well, The true lesson of a nation’s light in the sky, (More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,) The height to be superb humanity. Sounds of the Winter Sounds of the winter too, Sunshine upon the mountains--many a distant strain From cheery railroad train--from nearer field, barn, house, The whispering air--even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn, Children’s and women’s tones--rhythm of many a farmer and of flail, An old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet, Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt. A Twilight Song As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame, Musing on long-pass’d war-scenes--of the countless buried unknown soldiers, Of the vacant names, as unindented air’s and sea’s--the unreturn’d, The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the deep-fill’d trenches Of gather’d from dead all America, North, South, East, West, whence they came up, From wooded Maine, New-England’s farms, from fertile Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas, Texas, (Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless flickering flames, Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising--I hear the rhythmic tramp of the armies;) You million unwrit names all, all--you dark bequest from all the war, A special verse for you--a flash of duty long neglected--your mystic roll strangely gather’d here, Each name recall’d by me from out the darkness and death’s ashes, Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for many future year, Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or South, Embalm’d with love in this twilight song. When the Full-Grown Poet Came When the full-grown poet came, Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine; But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay he is mine alone; --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand; And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands, Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, And wholly and joyously blends them. Osceola