Rain dampens Sung-ling, spring fills with mist;
apricot blossoms and elm-seeds glitter
in freshly sown fields.
If you wonder where to go to hear the most beautiful singing:
at Eastgate and Level Lake, there are boats moored night and day!

From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;
From lethargy to fever of the heart;
From faithful life to dream-dowered days apart;
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban; —
Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran
Till now. Alas, the soul! — how soon must she
Accept her primal immortality —
The flesh resume its dust whence it began?

O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:
That when the peace is garnered in from strife,

The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.
On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy
Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude
Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude,
Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.
What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice
Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair
But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the wild air
All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling
And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling,

The way is long and dreary,
The path is bleak and bare;
Our feet are worn and weary,
But we will not despair.

More heavy was Thy burden,
More desolate Thy way,
O Lamb of God who takest
The sin of the world away,
Have mercy on us.

The snows lie thick around us
In the dark and gloomy night;
And the tempest wails above us,
And the stars have hid their light;
But blacker was the darkness
Round Calvary's Cross that day;
O Lamb of God who takest
The sin of the world away,
Have mercy on us.

Dwells within the soul of every Artist
More than all his effort can express;
And he knows the best remains unuttered
Sighing at what we call his success.

Vainly he may strive; he dare not tell us
All the sacred mysteries of the skies;
Vainly he may strive, the deepest beauty
Cannot be unveiled to mortal eyes.

And the more devoutly that he listens,
And the holier message that is sent,
Still the more his soul must struggle vainly,
Bowed beneath a noble discontent.

No great Thinker ever lived and taught you

All but unutterable Name!
Adorable, yet awful sound!
Thee can the sinful nations frame
Save with their foreheads on the ground?

Soul-searching and all-cleansing Fire;
To see Thy countenance were to die:
Yet how beyond the bound retire
Of Thy serene immensity?

Thou mov'st beside us, if the spot
We change — a noteless, wandering tribe;
The orbits of our life and thought
In Thee their little arcs describe.

In their dead calm, at cool of day,
We hear Thy voice, and turn, and flee:
Thy love outstrips us on our way!

Rags and tatters, rags and tatters,
rags and tatters — that's my life.
Food — somehow I pick it up along the road;
my house — I let the weeds grow all around.

Watching the moon, I spend the whole night mumbling poems;
lost in blossoms, I never come home.
Since I left the temple that trained me,
this is the kind of lazy old horse I've become.

What love I when I love Thee, O my God?
Not corporal beauty, nor the limb of snow,
Nor of loved light the white and pleasant flow,
Nor manna showers, nor streams that flow abroad,
Nor flowers of Heaven, nor small stars of the sod:
Not these, my God, I love, who love Thee so;
Yet love I something better than I know:—
A certain light on a more golden road;
A sweetness, not of honey or the hive;
A beauty, not of summer or the spring;
A scent, a music, and a blossoming
Eternal, timeless, placeless, without gyve,

Vile, and deformed by sin I stand,
A creature earthy of the earth;
Yet fashioned by God's perfect hand,
And in his likeness at my birth.

Here in a wretched land I roam,
As one who had no home but this;
Yet am invited to become
Partaker in a world of bliss.

A tenement of misery,
Of clay is this to which I cling:
A royal palace waits for me,
Built by the pleasure of my King!

My heavenly birthright I forsake, —
An outcast, and unreconciled;
The manner of his love doth make
My Father own me as his child.

Quitting kickball, the gods
went out to prepare for war.
Picking up the globelike ball that was left and holding it by his side,
a bridegroom, a god, walked quietly
to the house made of white wood, fresh with fragrance, and hid in it.
Suddenly, from there
a sound as limpid as a birth cry came out, running,
and in the clear cold dawn, in a bush, spilled a plum blossom.