What world honors could avail
Loss of this--the slanted mast,
And the roaring round the rail,
And the sheeted spray we cast
Round us as we seaward passed?
As the sad land sinks apace,
With it sinks each thought of care;
Think not now of aging face;
Question not the whitening hair:
Youth still beckons everywhere.
And the light we thought had fled
From the sky-line glows there now;
Bends the same blue overhead;
And the waves we used to plow
Part in beryl at the bow.
Hours like this we two have known
In the old days, when we sailed
Seaward ere the night had flown,
Or the morning star had paled
Like the shy eyes love has veiled.
Round our bow the ripples purled,
As the swift tide outward streamed
Through a hushed and ghostly world,
Where our harbor reaches seemed
Like a river that we dreamed.
Then we saw the black hills sway
In the waters' crinkled glass,
And the village wan and gray,
And the startled cattle pass
Through the tangled meadow-grass.
Through the glooming we have run
Straight into the gates of day,
Seen the crimson-edged sun
Burn the sea's gray bound away--
Leap to universal sway.
Little cared we where we drove
So the wind was strong and keen.
Oh, what sun-crowned waves we clove!
What cool shadows lurked between
Those long combers pale and green!
Graybeard pleasures are but toys;
Sorrow shatters them at last:
For this brief hour we are boys;
Trim the sheet and face the blast;
Sail into the happy past!
L.F. TOOKER.
Bereaved.
Let me come in where you sit weeping,--aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.
The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
To kiss.--Such arms--such hands I never knew.
May I not weep with you?
Fain would I be of service--say some thing,
Between the tears, that would be comforting,--
But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
Who have no child to die.
J.W. RILEY.
The Chariot.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain.
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
E. DICKINSON.
Indian Summer.
These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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