a white line running
    along his back, some are brindled,
Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—­see you! the bright hides,
See, the two with stars on their foreheads—­see, the round bodies
    and broad backs,
How straight and square they stand on their legs—­what fine sagacious eyes! 
How straight they watch their tamer—­they wish him near them—­how
    they turn to look after him! 
What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves away from them;
Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,
    poems, depart—­all else departs,)
I confess I envy only his fascination—­my silent, illiterate friend,
Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

} An Old Man’s Thought of School [For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874]

An old man’s thought of school,
An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot.

Now only do I know you,
O fair auroral skies—­O morning dew upon the grass!

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the soul’s voyage.

Only a lot of boys and girls? 
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes? 
Only a public school?

Ah more, infinitely more;
(As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this pile of brick and
    mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church? 
Why this is not the church at all—­the church is living, ever living
    souls.”)

And you America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present? 
The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil? 
To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.

} Wandering at Morn

Wandering at morn,
Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine! 
Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
    with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
This common marvel I beheld—­the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young,
The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

There ponder’d, felt I,
If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,
If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,
Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you? 
From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
Destin’d to fill the world.

} Italian Music in Dakota ["The Seventeenth—­the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]