GREATNESS LIVES APART.

  Great natures live apart; the mountain gray
    May call no comrade to his lonely side;
  The giant ocean, wrapped in storm and spray,
    Has no companion for her endless tide;
    The forest monarch, where his parents died,
  Can find no brother in his lofty sway,
    And mighty rivers chafe their margins wide
  Where infant rills and childish fountains play.

  So heroes live; no raptured blossoms start
    Where rugged heights of human glory end;
    No tender songs of loving beauty blend
  Their chorus in the great man’s peerless heart;
  Fate fills their souls with magnitude, and art
    Supplies their lives with no congenial friend.

POEMS.

  Poems are holy things.  Eternal Truth,
  Borrowing the robes of song and lovely grown,
  In them her glory unto man proclaims
  And fills his longing soul.  They softly speak
  Of Nature’s beauty and the secrets old
  Concealed behind the shadows of the hills,
  And love on angel fingers borne to men,
  Naming them over in so sweet a voice
  That music leads their footsteps in the ways
  Where God has walked; and with a lofty Harp,
  As wondrous as the gentle harps of heaven,
  Uplifts, ennobles, soothes and leads the race
  Unto its last great ultimate of power,
  To words of tenderness and goodly deeds.

SINGER AND SONG.

  A singer sang in sorrow long
  And breathed his life into his song.

  Unknown, unheard, the song went wide,
  Until the singer, starving, died.

  Now in their hearts the nations write
  And wear the singer’s song of might.

  Ah, singers fail and fall from view,
  But songs are always, always new!

  If garlands none to singers cling,
  Bays wreathe above the songs they sing.

TO ONE WHO PLEDGED HER FRIENDSHIP.

  Within this false world we may count ourselves blest,
    If we have but one friend who is faithful and true;
  And so in your friendship contented I’ll rest,
    And believe I have found that one blessing in you.

THE BANKS O’ TURKEY RUN.

  Like a thousan’ birds o’ brightness from the isles o’ summer seas,
  Rickollections, full o’ gladness, come with songs and lullabies,
  An’ I listen to the carols that with gentle voices roll,
  Full o’ tenderness an’ beauty, down upon my weary soul,
  Fer thar’s one thet keeps a-singin’ with a song thet’s never done,
  An’ I see the bendin’ willers on the banks o’ Turkey Run.

  An’ agin’ I be a youngster with a youngster’s foolin’ dreams,
  With his high-falutin’ notions an’ his fiddle-faddle schemes;
  With the laughin’ an’ the cryin’, with the sorrow an’ the joy,
  Thet is jumbled up together in the bosom o’ the boy;
  An’ agin my arly fancies in a fairy loom are spun
  Underneath the dancin’ shadders on the banks o’ Turkey Run.