TO DEATH Thou bidst me come away, Robert Herrick MORNING PRAYER When with the virgin morning thou dost rise, THE NILE It flows through old hush'd Egypt and its sands, Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roam'd through the young world, the glory extreme The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, Leigh Hunt "MEN OF ENGLAND, HEIRS OF GLORY" (From "The Mask of Anarchy ") Men of England, heirs of Glory, Rise like Lions after slumber Shake your chains to earth like dew Ye are many they are few. - Percy Bysshe Shelley THE FUTURE What may we take into the vast Forever? Admits no fruit of all our long endeavour, No garnered lore. What can we bear beyond the unknown portal? Of all our toiling: in the life immortal Nor gilds, nor stains. Naked from out that far abyss behind us We entered here: No word came with our coming, to remind us No hope, no fear. Into the silent, starless Night before us, No hand has mapped the constellations o'er us, No chart, no guide. Yet fearless toward that midnight, black and hollow, Our footsteps fare: The beckoning of a Father's hand we follow His love alone is there, No curse, no care. Edward Rowland Sill SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER'S DAY? Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, BRIGHT STAR! WOULD I WERE STEADFAST AS THOU ART Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task No yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, William SHE CAME AND WENT As a twig trembles, which a bird As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, The blue dome's measureless content, So my soul held that moment's heaven; I only know she came and went. As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps An angel stood and met my gaze, Oh, when the room grows slowly dim, James Russell Lowell |