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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

T. B. Aldrich

  • A mighty wind, like a leviathan,
  • Ploughed through the brine, and from these solitudes
  • Sent Silence frightened.
  • All the panes are hung with frost
  • Wild wizard-work of silver lace.
  • Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows
  • In yonder West: the fair, frail palaces,
  • The fading Alps and archipelagoes,
  • And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.
  • Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven
  • That from the East glad message brings:
  • Night is a stealthy, evil Raven,
  • Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.
  • For the poplars showed
  • The white of their leaves, the amber grain
  • Shrunk in the wind—and the lightning now
  • Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
  • In her eyes a thought
  • Grew sweeter and sweeter, deepening like the dawn,—
  • A mystical forewarning.
  • October turned my maple’s leaves to gold;
  • The most are gone now; here and there one lingers;
  • Soon these will slip from out the twig’s weak hold,
  • Like coins between a dying miser’s fingers.
  • The air is full of hints of grief,
  • Strange voices touched with pain—
  • The pathos of the falling leaf
  • And rustling of the rain.
  • The Summer comes and the Summer goes;
  • Wild-flowers are fringing the dusty lanes,
  • The shallows go darting through fragrant rains,
  • Then, all of a sudden—it snows.
  • The unchecked thought
  • Wanders at will upon enchanted ground,
  • Making no sound
  • In all the corridors***
  • The bell sleeps in the belfry—from its tongue
  • A drowsy murmur floats into the air,
  • Like thistle-down. Slumber is everywhere.
  • The rook’s asleep, and, in its dreaming, caws;
  • And silence mopes where nightingales have sung;
  • The Sirens lie in grottos cool and deep,
  • The Naiads in the streams.
  • The poplars showed
  • The white of their leaves, the amber grain
  • Shrunk in the wind,—and the lightning now
  • Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain!
  • There is a sadness in sweet sound
  • That quickens tears.
  • These Winter nights against my window-pane
  • Nature with busy pencil draws designs
  • Of ferns and blossoms and fine spray of pines,
  • Oak-leaf and acorn and fantastic vines,
  • Which she will make when summer comes again—
  • Quaint arabesques in argent, flat and cold,
  • Like curious Chinese etchings.
  • We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed
  • The white of their leaves, the amber grain
  • Shrunk in the wind,—and the lightning now
  • Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
  • What is a day to an immortal soul!
  • A breath, no more.
  • What probing deep
  • Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?
  • What thought is folded in thy leaves!
  • What tender thought, what speechless pain!
  • I hold thy faded lips to mine,
  • Thou darling of the April rain.
  • When I behold what pleasure is pursuit,
  • What life, what glorious eagerness it is,
  • Then mark how full possession falls from this,
  • How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit,—
  • I am perplext, and often stricken mute,
  • Wondering which attained the higher bliss,
  • The winged insect, or the chrysalis
  • It thrust aside with unreluctant foot.
  • When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
  • And in a dream as in a fairy bark
  • Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
  • To purple daybreak—little thought we pay
  • To that sweet bitter world we know by day.