Poems and Essays

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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897 - Citizenship - 236 pages
 

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Page 71 - The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Page 72 - These temples grew as grows the grass; Art might obey, but not surpass. The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned ; And the same power that reared the shrine Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Page 69 - Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being...
Page 73 - And through the priest the mind inspires. The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables yet unbroken; The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak, or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind. One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world hath never lost.
Page 17 - 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 traveller 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 115 - Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Page 121 - As no airpump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Page 68 - Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard. The rolling river, the morning bird; Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
Page 4 - We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.

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