STARS of the summer night!

_Prince Henry (reading)._ One morning, all alone,Out of his convent of gray stone,Into the forest older, darker, grayer,His lips moving as if in prayer,His head sunken upon his breastAs in a dream of rest,Walked the Monk Felix. All aboutThe broad, sweet sunshine lay without,Filling the summer air;And within the woodlands as he trod,The twilight was…

As if a thief wert thou?’‘I am the Wave of Life,Stained with my margin’s dust;From the struggle and the strifeOf the narrow stream I flyTo the Sea’s immensity,To wash from me the slimeOf the muddy banks of Time.’

Among them all one day that was my own!Fallacious hope; desires of the unknown,Lamenting, loving, burning, and in tears(For human passions all have stirred my mind),Have held me, now I feel and know, confinedBoth from the true and good still far away.I perish day by day;The sunshine fails, the shadows grow more dreary,And I am…

At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave,Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scoutShot down in skirmish, or disastrous routOf battle, when the loud artillery draveIts iron wedges through the ranks of braveAnd doomed battalions, storming the redoubt.Thou unknown hero sleeping by the seaIn thy forgotten grave! with secret shameI feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,When…

And bluebirds sang their sonnets in the gloomOf leaves that roofed them in from sun or rain?I know not; but a presence will remainFor ever and for ever in this room,Formless, diffused in air, like a perfume,–A phantom of the heart, and not the brain.Delicious days! when every spoken wordWas like a foot-fall nearer and…

He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,And carried away the Dean of JaenAnd sold him in Algiers.In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles,And weathercocks flying aloft in air,There are silver tankards of antique styles,Plunder of convent and castle, and pilesOf carpets rich and rare.In his tulip-garden there by…