Poetry Books

AN UPBRAIDING Now I am dead you sing to me   The songs we used to know,But while I lived you had no wish   Or care for doing so. Now I am dead you come to me   In the moonlight, comfortless;Ah, what would I have given alive   To win such tenderness! When you are dead, and stand to me   Not differenced, as now,But like again, will you be cold   As when we lived, or how? "These... more...

A SON OF THE SEAI was born for deep-sea faring;I was bred to put to sea;Stories of my father's daringFilled me at my mother's knee.I was sired among the surges;I was cubbed beside the foam;All my heart is in its verges,And the sea wind is my home.All my boyhood, from far vernalBourns of being, came to meDream-like, plangent, and eternalMemories of the plunging sea. Oh, the shambling sea is a... more...

CANTO III "THROUGH me you pass into the city of woe:Through me you pass into eternal pain:Through me among the people lost for aye.Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:To rear me was the task of power divine,Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.Before me things create were none, save thingsEternal, and eternal I endure. "All hope abandon ye who enter here." Such characters in colour... more...

CANTO I IN the midway of this our mortal life,I found me in a gloomy wood, astrayGone from the path direct: and e'en to tellIt were no easy task, how savage wildThat forest, how robust and rough its growth,Which to remember only, my dismayRenews, in bitterness not far from death.Yet to discourse of what there good befell,All else will I relate discover'd there.How first I enter'd it I... more...

Flag of The Free Flag of the free, our sable siresHave borne thee oft beforeInto hot battles' hell-lit fires,Against the fiercest foe.When first he shook his shaggy mein,And made the welkin ring,Brave Attucks fell upon the Plain,Thy stripes first crimsoning!Thy might and majesty we hurl,Against the bolts of Mars;And from thy ample folds unfurlThy field of flaming stars!Fond hope to nations in... more...

The Maid of Tamalpais. This she told me in the firelightAs I sat beside her campfire,In a grove of giant redwoods,On the slope of Tamalpais. Old she was, and bent and wrinkled,Lone survivor of the Tamals,Ancient tribe of Indian people,Who have left their name and legendOn the mountain they held sacred.On the ground she sat and brooded,With a blanket wrapped around her—Sat and gazed into the... more...

INTRODUCTION. All civilized nations possessing a history which they contemplate with pride endeavour to present that history in an epic form. In their initial stages of culture the vehicles of expression are ballads like the constituents of the Spanish Romanceros and chronicles like Joinville’s and Froissart’s. With literary refinement comes the distinct literary purpose, and the poet appears who... more...

INTRODUCTION Evan Lloyd’s works consist chiefly of four satires written in 1766 and 1767, all of which are now little-known. What little notice he receives today results from his friendship with John Wilkes and David Garrick and from one satire, The Methodist, which is usually included in surveys of anti-Methodist literature. For the most part, his obscurity is deserved. In The Methodist, however, he... more...

MORNING IN KANSAS There are lands beyond the ocean which are gray beneath their years, where a hundred generations learned to sow and reap and spin; where the sons of Shem and Japhet wet the furrow with their tears—and the noontide is departed, and the night is closing in. Long ago the shadows lengthened in the lands across the sea, and the dusk is now enshrouding regions nearer home, alas! There are... more...

INTRODUCTION To the modern reader, with an abundance of periodicals of all sorts and upon all subjects at hand, it seems hardly possible that this wealth of ephemeral literature was virtually developed within the past two centuries. It offers such a rational means for the dissemination of the latest scientific and literary news that the mind undeceived by facts would naturally place the origin of the... more...