Early to bed
Early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Thou art the Way!
All ways are thorny mazes without Thee;
Where hearts are pierced, and thoughts all aimless stray;
In Thee the heart stands firm, the life moves free:
Thou art our Way!


Thou art the Truth!
Questions the ages break against in vain
Confront the spirit in its untried youth;
It starves while learning poison from the grain:
Thou art the Truth!


Thou art the Truth!
Truth for the mind grand, glorious, infinite,
A heaven still boundless o'er its highest growth;
Bread for the heart its daily need to meet:

The soul shall be drowned in the flood
Of mounting blood.
Be strong at least
To resist Love,
Except at his feast.

Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest,—
Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon,—
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky

Rolled in a smouldering mist, wrapt in an ardent cloud,
Over ridged roofs, over the buried roar
That comes and goes
Where shadowy London mutters at the core
Of meeting streets interminably ploughed
Through blackness built and steepled and immense
With felt, unfeatured, waste magnificence,
The night shudders and glows.
Ensanguined skies, that lower and lift and change
Each instant! sullen with a spectral rose
Upon the towered horizon; but more near
A lurid vapour, throbbing up the gloom,
Glares like a furnace fume;

I love your blighted garden bare
With borders Autumn-cold,
For, midmost of it, blossoms there
The burning marigold.

Friend, when October dulls your fire,
And flowers of hope lie dead,
May memories rich in gold attire
Stay round your heart instead.

Perhaps already you may know
SIR BLENNERHASSET PORTICO?
A Captain in the Navy, he—
A Baronet and K.C.B.
You do? I thought so!
It was that Captain's favourite whim
(A notion not confined to him)
That RODNEY was the greatest tar
Who ever wielded capstan-bar.
He had been taught so.

“BENBOW! CORNWALLIS! HOOD!—Belay!
Compared with RODNEY”—he would say—
“No other tar is worth a rap!
The great LORD RODNEY was the chap
The French to polish!
“Though, mind you, I respect LORD HOOD;
CORNWALLIS, too, was rather good;
BENBOW could enemies repel,

The lovely body of the dead,
Wherein he laid him down to rest,
Is shrunken to corruption's thread;
The blood which delicately dressed
The flying bone, the sighing breast,
One with nothingness is made.

The darling garment is outworn;
Its fabric nourishes the moth;
The silk wherein his soul was born,
Woven of flesh and spirit both,
Is crumpled to a pitiful cloth:
His soul lies naked and forlorn.

So one that walks within the air,
Who loves the ghost below the ground,
Rejoices fervently to wear
A body shaken and unsound;

Look you, my simple friend, 'tis one of those,
(Alack, a common weed of our ill time),
Who, do whate'er they may, go where they will,
Must needs still carry about the looking-glass
Of vain philosophy. And if so be
That some small natural gesture shall escape them,
(Nature will out) straightway about they turn,
And con it duly there, and note it down,
With inward glee and much complacent chuckling,
Part in conceit of their superior science,
Part in forevision of the attentive look
And laughing glance that may one time reward them,

S UMMER'S forerunner! See, she sendeth thee
To search the land and make it soft with showers
And sun and dew, and fit it for her flowers.
Haste, then, sweet month,—ply all thy witchery
To do her bidding: frozen brooks set free
With softest blowing winds; from southern bowers
Call the blithe robin; to essay its powers
Of ruddy bloom, tease the red maple tree
Till it make answer; coax with violets,
And shame with life astir beneath her snow,
The cold, reluctant earth, that she may grow
Right motherly, and mindful of her pets,—