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Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant
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My bird has flown away,
Far out of sight has flown, I know not where.
Look in your lawn, I pray,
Ye maidens, kind and fair,
And see if my beloved bird be there.
His eyes are full of light;
The eagle of the rock has such an eye;
And plumes, exceeding bright,
Round his smooth temples lie,
And sweet his voice and tender as a sigh.
Look where the grass is gay
With summer blossoms, haply there he cowers;
And search, from spray to spray,
The leafy laurel-bowers,
For well he loves the laurels and the flowers.
Find him, but do not dwell,
With eyes too fond, on the fair form you see,
Nor love his song too well;
Send him, at once, to me,
Or leave him to the air and liberty.
For only from my hand
He takes the seed into his golden beak,
And all unwiped shall stand
The tears that wet my cheek,
Till I have found the wanderer I seek.
My sight is darkened o'er,
Whene'er I miss his eyes, which are my day,
And when I hear no more
The music of his lay,
My heart in utter sadness faints away.
THE NIGHT JOURNEY OF A RIVER
Oh River, gentle River! gliding on
In silence underneath the starless sky!
Thine is a ministry that never rests
Even while the living slumber. For a time
The meddler, man, hath left the elements
In peace; the ploughman breaks the clods no more;
The miner labors not, with steel and fire,
To rend the rock, and he that hews the stone,
And he that fells the forest, he that guides
The loaded wain, and the poor animal
That drags it, have forgotten, for a time,
Their toils, and share the quiet of the earth.
Thou pausest not in thine allotted task,
Oh darkling River! Through the night I hear
Thy wavelets rippling on the pebbly beach;
I hear thy current stir the rustling sedge,
That skirts thy bed; thou intermittest not
Thine everlasting journey, drawing on
A silvery train from many a woodland spring
And mountain-brook. The dweller by thy side,
Who moored his little boat upon thy beach,
Though all the waters that upbore it then
Have slid away o'er night, shall find, at morn,
Thy channel filled with waters freshly drawn
From distant cliffs, and hollows where the rill
Comes up amid the water-flags. All night
Thou givest moisture to the thirsty roots
Of the lithe willow and o'erhanging plane,
And cherishest the herbage of thy bank,
Spotted with little flowers, and sendest up
Perpetually the vapors from thy face,
To steep the hills with dew, or darken heaven
With drifting clouds, that trail the shadowy shower.
Oh River! darkling River! what a voice
Is that thou utterest while all else is still —
The ancient voice that, centuries ago,
Sounded between thy hills, while Rome was yet
A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream!
How many, at this hour, along thy course,
Slumber to thine eternal murmurings,
That mingle with the utterance of their dreams!
At dead of night the child awakes and hears
Thy soft, familiar dashings, and is soothed,
And sleeps again. An airy multitude
Of little echoes, all unheard by day,
Faintly repeat, till morning, after thee,
The story of thine endless goings forth.
Yet there are those who lie beside thy bed
For whom thou once didst rear the bowers that screen
Thy margin, and didst water the green fields;
And now there is no night so still that they
Can hear thy lapse; their slumbers, were thy voice
Louder than Ocean's, it could never break.
For them the early violet no more
Opens upon thy bank, nor, for their eyes,
Glitter the crimson pictures of the clouds,
Upon thy bosom, when the sun goes down.
Their memories are abroad, the memories
Of those who last were gathered to the earth,
Lingering within the homes in which they sat,
Hovering above the paths in which they walked,
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