I

Oh, how good it is to be
Foot-loose and heart-free!
Just my dog and pipe and I, underneath the vast sky;
Trail to try and goal to win, white road and cool inn;
Fields to lure a lad afar, clear spring and still star;
Lilting feet that never tire, green dingle, fagot fire;
None to hurry, none to hold, heather hill and hushed fold;
Nature like a picture book, laughing leaf and bright brook;
Every day a jewel bright, set serenely in the night;

Love:
To approach you with the touch the sculptor gives his clay,
Subdued, inspired:
To catch in the radiance of my heart the purity of yours,
White breathless fires:
To let the still sea of song in my spirit move toward its shore, your soul,
With dying music: (Oh, hear me, adored one!)

Love:
To watch as one watches the face of the beloved coming out of death,
Every wavering of your lashes:
To feel each fluctuation of your yearning and your desire,
And meet it with caresses:
To enfold you gently until your whole soul slides into mine,

She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
Past the Dead and sneak away.

Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
And groped his way to the Dead.

" What's the Devil's Harvest to-day? " he cried;
" A wanton with eyes of blue!
I've known too many a such, " he sighed;
" Maybe I know this ... mon Dieu! "

He raised the head of the heedless Dead;

When steadily blew the wind from shores of Thrace,
And stirred the vines of Lesbos, loaded down
With racy fruit all round Methymna town,
Lo, floating on the water, came a dead man's face.

And from the pallid, parted lips thereof
Issued strange singing of idyllic song,
As it lay tossing white-capped waves among,
Upturned to the sweet sky that smiling bent above.

What wondrous flotsam! And a golden shell
Drifted beside it, stringed with silver chords,
Playing fit accompaniment to the words

With wisdom warify you so proceed,
Insuing which, a wary one indeed,
Likely you are to lim forth wary age ,
Like a true wise man, wisely to presage
Insuing evill, e're it be at hand,
And talting wary wisely to withstand,
Making in health a preparation well.

Griefe of hearts-eating sicknes to expell:
Rightly in life fitting your self to have,
As one day sure you must a death, a grave;
You thus in life 'gainst all events prepared,
Ever lim forth a wary age well carried.

 Evening sunshine never
Solace to my window bears,
Morning sunshine elsewhere fares;—
 Here are shadows ever.

 Sunshine freely falling,
Wilt thou not my chamber find?
Here some rays would reach a mind,
 'Mid the dark appalling.

 Morning sunshine's gladness,
Oh, thou art my childhood bright;
While thou playest pure and white,
  I would weep in sadness.

 Evening sunshine's whiling,
Oh, thou art the wise man's rest;—
Farther on! Then from the west
 Greet my window smiling!

 Morning sunshine's singing,

Sing we of the Golden City
Pictured in the legends old;
Everlasting light shines o'er it,
Wondrous tales of it are told.
Only righteous men and women
Dwell within its gleaming wall;
Wrong is banished from its borders,
Justice reigns supreme o'er all.

We are builders of that City;
All our joys and all our groans
Help to rear its shining ramparts,
All our lives are building-stones.
But the work that we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears,
And in error and in anguish,
Will not perish with our years.

Broad the sails o'er the North Sea go;
High on deck in the morning glow
Erling Skjalgsson from Sole
Scans all the sea toward Denmark:
“Cometh never Olaf Trygvason?”

Six and fifty the ships are there,
Sails are let down, toward Denmark stare
Sun-reddened men;—then murmur:
“Where is the great Long Serpent?
Cometh never Olaf Trygvason?”

When the sun in the second dawn
Cloudward rising no mast had drawn,
Grew to a storm their clamor:
“Where is the great Long Serpent?
Cometh never Olaf Trygvason?”

All before us lies the way,
Give the past unto the wind!
All before us is the day,
Night and darkness are behind.

Eden, with its angels bold,
Love, and flowers, and coolest sea,
Is not ancient story told,
But a glowing prophecy.

In the spirit's perfect air,
In the passions tame and kind,
Innocence from selfish care,
The real Eden we shall find.

When the soul to sin hath died,
True and beautiful and sound,
Then all earth is sanctified,
Upsprings Paradise, around!

From this spirit-land, afar

He'd been for years in Sydney " a-acting of the goat " ,
His name was Joseph Swallow, " the Great Australian Pote " ,
In spite of all the stories and sketches that he wrote.

And so his friends held meetings (O narrow souls were theirs!)
To advertise their little selves and Joseph's own affairs.
They got up a collection for Joseph unawares.

They looked up his connections and rivals by the score —
The wife who had divorced him some twenty years before,
And several politicians he'd made feel very sore.