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The Reunion
© John Greenleaf Whittier
The gulf of seven and fifty years
We stretch our welcoming hands across;
The distance but a pebble's toss
Between us and our youth appears.
The Two Blackbirds
© George Meredith
A blackbird in a wicker cage,
That hung and swung 'mid fruits and flowers,
Had learnt the song-charm, to assuage
The drearness of its wingless hours.
To the United States Senate
© Vachel Lindsay
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
Rules And Lessons
© Henry Vaughan
When first thine eyes unveil, give thy soul leave
To do the like: our bodies but forerun
The spirit's duty. True hearts spread and heave
Unto their God, as flowers do to the sun.
Give Him thy first thoughts then; so shalt thou keep
Him company all day, and in Him sleep.
Virginia
© Thomas Babbington Macaulay
Fragments of a Lay Sung in the Forum on the Day Whereon Lucius Sextius Sextinus Lateranus and Caius Licinius Calvus Stolo Were Elected Tribunes of the Commons the Fifth Time, in the Year of the City CCCLXXXII.
Ye good men of the Commons, with loving hearts and true,
Marmion: Introduction to Canto V.
© Sir Walter Scott
When dark December glooms the day,
And takes our autumn joys away;
Epitaphs For Two Players
© Vachel Lindsay
Yorick is dead. Boy Hamlet walks forlorn
Beneath the battlements of Elsinore.
Where are those oddities and capers now
That used to "set the table on a roar"?
The Black Hawk War of the Artists
© Vachel Lindsay
Power to restore
All that the white hand mars.
See the dead east
Crushed with the iron cars
Chimneys black
Blinding the sun and stars!
The Empty Boats
© Vachel Lindsay
Why do I see these empty boats, sailing on airy seas?
One haunted me the whole night long, swaying with every breeze,
Returning always near the eaves, or by the skylight glass:
There it will wait me many weeks, and then, at last, will pass.
When Early March Seems Middle May
© James Whitcomb Riley
When country roads begin to thaw
In mottled spots of damp and dust,
And fences by the margin draw
Along the frosty crust
Their graphic silhouettes, I say,
The Spring is coming round this way.
The Pilgrim's Vision
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
The trees all clad in icicles,
The streams that did not flow;
A sudden thought flashed o'er him,-
A dream of long ago,-
He smote his leathern jerkin,
And murmured, "Even so!"
The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son
© Vachel Lindsay
THE North Star whispers: "You are one
Of those whose course no chance can change.
You blunder, but are not undone,
Your spirit-task is fixed and strange.
The Perfect Marriage
© Vachel Lindsay
I hate this yoke; for the world's sake here put it on:
Knowing 'twill weigh as much on you till life is gone.
Knowing you love your freedom dear, as I love mine
Knowing that love unchained has been our life's great wine:
Our one great wine (yet spent too soon, and serving none;
Of the two cups free love at last the deadly one).
The Sepulchre Of Memory
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee
Has been my heartand thy dead memory
Has lain from childhood, many a changeful year,
Unchangingly preserved and buried there.
A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign
© Vachel Lindsay
I LOOK on the specious electrical light
Blatant, mechanical, crawling and white,
Wickedly red or malignantly green
Like the beads of a young Senegambian queen.
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
