Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
Thy Marathon, and thy Thermopylae?
Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
Which on such golden memories can lean?
THE FUNERAL BELL
One more is gone
Out of the busy throng
That tread these paths;
The church-bell tolls,
Its sad knell rolls
To many hearths.
Flower-bells toll not,
Their echoes roll not
Upon my ear;
There still perchance
That gentle spirit haunts
A fragrant bier.
Low lies the pall,
Lowly the mourners all
Their passage grope;
No sable hue
Mars the serene blue
Of heaven’s cope.
In distant dell
Faint sounds the funeral bell;
A heavenly chime;
Some poet there
Weaves the light-burthened air
Into sweet rhyme.
THE SUMMER RAIN
My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read,
’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare’s life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?