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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Sentinel Year

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Sentinel Year

By William Osborn Stoddard (1835–1925)

[From Verses of Many Days. 1875.]

A Fragment.

THE BELLS are tolling in the towers of time

Solemnly, now, for midnight and for morn.

Another sentinel year has paced his rounds,

And, weary of his watch, now grounds his arms,

Gives up his post to the new sentinel,

And gathers him to rest and to his dreams—

Dreams of the strange things that his watch hath seen.