And there are woven with his jollities The nameless and eternal tragedies That render hope and hopelessness akin. We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel A still chord sorrow-swept, — a weird unrest; And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal, As if the very ghost of mirth were dead —      As if the joys of time to dreams had fled, Or sailed away with Ines to the West. 

  

       The Miracle     

      "Dear brother, dearest friend, when I am dead, And you shall see no more this face of mine, Let nothing but red roses be the sign Of the white life I lost for him," she said;      "No, do not curse him, — pity him instead; Forgive him! — forgive me! . . God's anodyne For human hate is pity; and the wine That makes men wise, forgiveness. I have read Love's message in love's murder, and I die."      And so they laid her just where she would lie, —      Under red roses. Red they bloomed and fell; But when flushed autumn and the snows went by, And spring came, — lo, from every bud's green shell Burst a white blossom.  — Can love reason why? 

  

       Horace to Leuconoe     

      I pray you not, Leuconoe, to pore With unpermitted eyes on what may be Appointed by the gods for you and me, Nor on Chaldean figures any more.      'T were infinitely better to implore The present only: — whether Jove decree More winters yet to come, or whether he Make even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shore Shatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last —      Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fill Your bosom with large hopes; for while I sing, The envious close of time is narrowing; —      So seize the day, — or ever it be past, —      And let the morrow come for what it will. 

  

       Reuben Bright     

      Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she 

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