Oh that a Song would sing itself to me

Thou gazest at the painted tiles,Whose figures grace,With many a grotesque form and face.The ancient chimney of thy nursery!The lady with the gay macaw,The dancing girl, the grave bashawWith bearded lip and chin;And, leaning idly o’er his gate,Beneath the imperial fan of state,The Chinese mandarin.With what a look of proud commandThou shakest in thy little…

I heard the first wave of the rising tideRush onward with uninterrupted sweep;A voice out of the silence of the deep,A sound mysteriously multipliedAs of a cataract from the mountain’s side,Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.So comes to us at times, from the unknownAnd inaccessible solitudes of being,The rushing of the sea-tides of…

There came a Saxon monk, and founded hereA Priory, pillaged by marauding Danes,So that thereof no vestige now remains;Only a name, that, spoken loud and clear,And echoed in another hemisphere,Survives the sculptured walls and painted panes.St. Botolph’s Town! Far over leagues of landAnd leagues of sea looks forth its noble tower,And far around the chiming…

The streets, with their watchmen, were lost to my sight,As I wandered so lightIn the night, in the night,Through the gate with the arch mediaeval.The mill-brook rushed from the rocky height,I leaned o’er the bridge in my yearning;Deep under me watched I the waves in their flight,As they glided so lightIn the night, in the…

Laid his hand upon his sword,As he leaned upon the railing,And his ships went sailing, sailingNorthward into Drontheim fiord.There he stood as one who dreamed;And the red light glanced and gleamedOn the armor that he wore;And he shouted, as the riftedStreamers o’er him shook and shifted,‘I accept thy challenge, Thor!’To avenge his father slain,And reconquer…

And Torquemada, with his subtle brain,Ruled them, as Grand Inquisitor of Spain,In a great castle near Valladolid,Moated and high and by fair woodlands hid,There dwelt, as from the chronicles we learn,An old Hidalgo proud and taciturn,Whose name has perished, with his towers of stone,And all his actions save this one alone;This one, so terrible, perhaps…