Sands at Seventy Dannabatta. My city's fit and noble name resumed, Choice aboriginal name, with marvellous beauty, meaning, A rocky founded island-shores where ever gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves. Paumanok. SEA-BEAUTY! stretch'd and basking! One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce, steamers, sails, And one the Atlantic's wind caressing, fierce or gentle - mighty hulls dark-gliding in the distance. Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water- healthy air and soil! Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine! From Montauk Point. I STAND as on some mighty eagle's beak, Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,) The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance, The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps-that inbound urge and urge of waves, Seeking the shores forever. To Those Wbo 've Fail'd. To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast, To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead, To calm, devoted engineers—to over-ardent travelers—to pilots on their ships, To many a lofty song and picture without recognition - I'd rear a laurel-cover'd monument, High, high above the rest - To all cut off before their time, Quench'd by an early death. A Carol Closing Sixty-nine. A CAROL closing sixty-nine — a résumé — a repetition, your items all; Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast, The body wreck'd, old, poor and paralyzed — the strange inertia falling pall-like round me, The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct, The undiminish'd faith-the groups of loving friends. The Bravest Soldiers. BRAVE, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through the fight; But the bravest press'd to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown. A Font of Type. THIS latent mine- these unlaunch'd voices-passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within the pallid slivers slumbering. As 1 Sit Writing Dere. As I sit writing here, sick and grown old, Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities, Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui, May filter in my daily songs. My Canary Bird. DID we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books, Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations? But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble, Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon, Is it not just as great, O soul? |