Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day
which is not my birthday but will do until
the eleventh of June comes around and I know
what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat

Warned

© Wilcox Ella Wheeler

They stood at the garden gate.
By the lifting of a lid
She might have read her fate
In a little thing he did.

Elegy I

© Henry James Pye

O Happiness! thou wish of every mind,

Whose form, more subtle than the fleeting air,

The Cities Of The Plain

© John Greenleaf Whittier

"Get ye up from the wrath of God's terrible day!
Ungirded, unsandalled, arise and away!
'T is the vintage of blood, 't is the fulness of time,
And vengeance shall gather the harvest of crime!"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

© Vachel Lindsay

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sat gossiping with Robert.
(She was really a raving beauty in her day.
With Mary Pickford curls in clouds and whirls.)

Carlyle

© Paul Hamilton Hayne

O GRANITE nature; like a mountain height
Which pierces heaven! yet with foundations deep,
Rooted where earth's majestic forces sleep,
In quiet breathing on the breast of night:--

The Third Satire Of Dr. John Donne

Compassion checks my spleen, yet Scorn denies
The tears a passage thro' my swelling eyes;
To laugh or weep at sins, might idly show,
Unheedful passion, or unfruitful woe.
Satyr! arise, and try thy sharper ways,
If ever Satyr cur'd an old disease.

Sonnet XXV: The Wisest Scholar

The wisest scholar of the wight most wise
By Phoebus' doom, with sugar'd sentence says,
That Virtue, if it once met with our eyes,
Strange flames of love it in our souls would raise;

La Vie de Boheme

© Amy Lowell

Alone, I whet my soul against the keen

Unwrinkled sky, with its long stretching blue.

Astrophel and Stella VII

When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes,In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?Would she in beamy black, like painter wise,Frame daintiest lustre, mix'd of shades and light?Or did she else that sober hue devise,In object best to knit and strength our sight;Lest, if no veil these brave gleams did disguise,They, sunlike, should more dazzle than delight?Or would she her miraculous power show,That, whereas black seems beauty's contrary,She even in black doth make all beauties flow?Both so, and thus,--she, minding Love should bePlac'd ever there, gave him this mourning weedTo honour all their deaths who for her bleed

O Star Of France

© Walt Whitman

The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame,
Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long,
Beseems to-day a wreck, driven by the gale-a mastless hulk;
And 'mid its teeming, madden'd, half-drown'd crowds,
Nor helm nor helmsman.

Dedication

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.