Illustrated Birthday Book of American Poets

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Almira Leach Hayward
Houghton, Mifflin, 1881 - Birthday books - 307 pages

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Page 233 - Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood ? Alas ! they all are in their graves ; the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie ; but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy Dearth the lovely ones again.
Page 190 - For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been...
Page 233 - The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread...
Page 1 - Unwarmed by any sunset light The gray day darkened into night A night made hoary with the swarm And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, As zigzag, wavering to and fro, Crossed and recrossed the winged snow: And ere the early bedtime came The white drift piled the window-frame, And through the glass the clothes-line posts Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
Page 86 - Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll ! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
Page 255 - Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Page 238 - Past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary. Be still, sad heart ! and cease repining ; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining ; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.
Page 128 - The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept. Were toiling upward in the night.
Page 64 - Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still travelling downward from the sky, Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men.
Page 30 - Nothing useless is, or low ; Each thing in its place is best ; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest.

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