For a day and a night aud a morrow, The holy spirit of man. From the winds of the north and the south They gathered as unto strife; They breathed upon his mouth, They filled his body with life; And love, and a space for delight, And night, and sleep in the night. In his heart is a blind desire, In his eyes foreknowledge of death; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep. DEKZEMA, Poetry. 4th Ed. 18 These prairies glow with flowers, And yet I pine to see My native hill once more, And hear the sparrow's friendly chirp Beside its cottage-door. And he, for whom I left My native hill and brook, Alas, I sometimes think I trace A coldness in his look! If I have lost his love, I know my heart will break; And haply, they I left for him Will sorrow for my sake. THE TIDES. The moon is at her full, and, riding high, The airs that hover in the summer-sky There comes no voice from the great woodlands round Beneath the shadow of their boughs the ground But ever heaves and moans the restless Deep; Afar I see the glimmering billows leap; Each wave springs upward, climbing toward the fair Pure light that sits on high Springs eagerly, and faintly sinks, to where The mother-waters lie. Upward again it swells; the moonbeams show Again it feels the fatal weight below, Again and yet again; until the Deep And, with a sullen moan, abashed, they creep Brief respite! they shall rush from that recess And fling themselves, with unavailing stress, O restless Sea, that, in thy prison here, Through the slow centuries yearning to be near The glorious source of light and heat must warm Thy billows from on high, And change them to the cloudy trains that form The curtain of the sky. Then only may they leave the waste of brine And rise above the hills of earth, and shine THE PRAIRIES. These are the gardens of the Desert, these As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, No Motionless? they are all unchained again. The clouds Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath, The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South! Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers, And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high, Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks A nobler or a lovelier scene than this? Man hath no power in all this glorious work: |