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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

R. W. Gilder

  • From all the misty morning air, there comes a summer sound,
  • A murmur as of waters from skies, and trees, and ground.
  • The birds they sing upon the wing, the pigeons bill and coo.
  • I am a woman—therefore I may not
  • Call to him, cry to him,
  • Fly to him,
  • Bid him delay not!
  • In the embers shining bright
  • A garden grows for thy delight,
  • With roses yellow, red, and white.
  • But, O my child, beware, beware!
  • Touch not the roses growing there,
  • For every rose a thorn doth bear.
  • None who e’er knew her can believe her dead;
  • Though, should she die, they deem it well might be
  • Her spirit took its everlasting flight
  • In summer’s glory, by the sunset sea,
  • That onward through the Golden Gate is fled.
  • Ah, where that bright soul is cannot be night.
  • Now you who rhyme, and I who rhyme,
  • Have not we sworn it, many a time,
  • That we no more our verse would scrawl,
  • For Shakespeare he had said it all!
  • Oh, father’s gone to market-town, he was up before the day,
  • And Jamie’s after robins, and the man is making hay,
  • And whistling down the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill,
  • While mother from the kitchen door is calling with a will,
  • “Polly!—Polly!—The cows are in the corn! Oh, where’s Polly?”
  • The smile of her I love is like the dawn
  • Whose touch makes Memnon sing:
  • O see where wide the golden sunlight flows—
  • The barren desert blossoms as the rose!
  • What babe new born is this that in a manger cries?
  • Near on her lowly bed his happy mother lies.
  • Oh, see the air is shaken with white and heavenly wings—
  • This is the Lord of all the earth, this is the King of Kings.
  • What is a Sonnet? ’Tis the pearly shell
  • That murmurs of the far-off, murmuring sea;
  • A precious jewel carved most curiously;
  • It is a little picture painted well.
  • What is a Sonnet? ’Tis the tear that fell
  • From a great poet’s hidden ecstacy;
  • A two-edged sword, a star, a song—ah me!
  • Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell.
  • Ye living soldiers of the mighty war,
  • Once more from roaring cannon and the drums
  • And bugles blown at morn, the summons comes;
  • Forget the halting limb, each wound and scar:
  • Once more your Captain calls to you;
  • Come to his last review!