But, Dear, keep thou in mind
These moments swift and sweet!
Their memory thou shall find
Illume the common street;
And thro' the dust and din,
Smiling, thy heart shall hear
Quiet waters lapsing thin,
And locusts shrilling clear.
LOTOS.
Wherefore awake so long,
Wide-eyed, laden with care?
Not all battle is life,
But a little respite and peace
May fold us round as a fleece
Soft-woven for all men's wear.
Sleep, then, mindless of strife;
Slumber, dreamless of wrong;—
Hearken my slumber-song,
Falling asleep.
Drowsily all noon long
The warm winds rustle the grass
Hush'dly, lulling thy brain,—
Burthened with murmur of bees
And numberless whispers, and ease.
Dream-clouds gather and pass
Of painless remembrance of pain.
Havened from rumor of wrong,
Dreams are thy slumber-song,
Fallen asleep.
THE SOWER.
A brown sad-colored hillside, where the soil,
Fresh from the frequent harrow, deep and fine,
Lies bare; no break in the remote sky-line,
Save where a flock of pigeons streams aloft,
Startled from feed in some low-lying croft,
Or far-off spires with yellow of sunset shine;
And here the Sower, unwittingly divine,
Exerts the silent forethought of his toil.
Alone he treads the glebe, his measured stride
Dumb in the yielding soil; and tho' small joy
Dwell in his heavy face, as spreads the blind
Pale grain from his dispensing palm aside,
This plodding churl grows great in his employ;—
Godlike, he makes provision for mankind.
THE POTATO HARVEST.
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge, a clamor of crows that fly
In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn
To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;
A line of gray snake-fence, that zigzags by
A pond, and cattle, from the homestead nigh
The long deep summonings of the supper horn.