I had A guinea golden.
I had a guinea golden;
I lost it in the sand,
And though the sum was simple,
And pounds were in the land,
Still had it such a value
Unto my frugal eye,
That when I could not find it
I sat me down to sigh.
I had a crimson robin
Who sang full many a day,
But when the woods were painted
He, too, did fly away.
Time brought me other robins, —
Their ballads were the same, —
Still for my missing troubadour
I kept the ‘house at hame.’
I had a star in heaven;
One Pleiad was its name,
And when I was not heeding
It wandered from the same.
And though the skies are crowded,
And all the night ashine,
I do not care about it,
Since none of them are mine.
My story has a moral:
I have a missing friend, —
Pleiad its name, and robin,
And guinea in the sand, —
And when this mournful ditty,
Accompanied with tear,
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here,
Grant that repentance solemn
May seize upon his mind,
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.
Note. — This poem may have had, like
many others, a personal origin. It is more than
probable that it was sent to some friend travelling
in Europe, a dainty reminder of letter-writing delinquencies.
Saturday afternoon.
From all the jails the boys and girls
Ecstatically leap, —
Beloved, only afternoon
That prison doesn’t keep.
They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!
Few get enough, — enough is one;
To that ethereal throng
Have not each one of us the right
To stealthily belong?
Upon the gallows hung a wretch,
Too sullied for the hell
To which the law entitled him.
As nature’s curtain fell
The one who bore him tottered in,
For this was woman’s son.
‘’T was all I had,’ she stricken
gasped;
Oh, what a livid boon!
The lost thought.
I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.
Reticence.
The reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan;
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man.
