Meditations in America, and Other Poems

William Ross Wallace

C. Scribner, 1851 - United States - 143 pages

Contents

• PRELUDE Of Thine Own Country Sing PAGE: 9
• Greenwood Cemetery: 24
• The Liberty Bell 87: 37
• The Mounds of America: 52
• Avelinea Song: 65
• Wordsworth: 81
• MahometEl Amin: 93
• The Street Flute Player: 100
• Lines on Robert Walsh: 112
• Song: 120
• The American Epic: 137

Popular passages

Page 26 - ... hearse Moves slowly through the winding walks, or Death For a brief moment pauses : all shall come To feel the touching eloquence of graves : And therefore it was well for us to clothe The place with beauty. No dark terror here Shall chill the generous tropic of the soul; But Poetry and her starred comrade Art Shall make the sacred country of the dead Magnificent. The fragrant flowers shall smile Over the low, green graves; the trees shall shake Their soul-like cadences upon the tombs; The little...‎

Page 24 - HERE are the houses of the dead. Here youth And age and manhood, stricken in his strength, Hold solemn state and awful silence keep, While Earth goes murmuring in her ancient path, And troubled Ocean tosses to and fro Upon his mountainous bed impatiently, And many stars make worship musical In the dim-aisled abyss, and over all The Lord of Life, in meditation sits Changeless, alone, beneath the large white dome Of Immortality. I pause and think Among these walks lined by the frequent tombs ; For...‎

Page 14 - Saxon sprung from her own loins In far America. Roll on ! roll on, Thou river of the North ! Tell thou to all The isles, tell thou to all the continents The grandeur of my land. Speak of its vales Where Independence wears a pastoral wreath Amid the holy quiet of his flock; And of its mountains with their cloudy beards Tossed by the breath of centuries ; and speak Of its tall cataracts that roll their bass Among the choral of its midnight storms, And of its rivers lingering through the...‎

Page 130 - And lofty chambers stalketh Pride, And hungry, pale Ambition, scenting power, Wilt thou not let the wearied river steal Through quiet hills for one short hour, And dream, unvexed by the eager keel, Of that sweet peace he knew in times of old, When only Nature sat near him and...‎

Page 22 - Hero's hall of shells, Far away from Hela's darkness And the coward's hell of hells. Let us learn that old North Edda, Chanted grandly on the grave : Still for Man the one thing needful In his world is to be brave. Valkyrs yet are forth and choosing Who must be among the slain : Let us, like that grim old Sea-King, Smile at Death upon the plain : Smile at tyrants leagued with falsehood, Knowing Truth, eternal, stands With the Book, God wrote for Freedom, Always open in her hands; Smile at fear when...‎

Page 132 - K"r lufflixl a feather in the rude fire-shocks. Millions, a lesson ye can learn from these. And see, the great woods slumber, and the lake No longer is awake Beneath the stars, that nod and start with sleep In their white-clouded deep : Fitfully the moon goes nodding through The valleys of the vapory blue, And dreams, forgetting all her queenly ills, Of angels sleeping on Elysian hills : The drowsy lake, So sweet is slumber, would not yet awake ; But — like an infant two years old, Before whose...‎

Page 50 - Like far-off stars that glimmer in a cloud, Deathless, O Gods! shall ye illume the PAST: To ye the poet-voice will call aloud, " Faithful among the faithless " to the last. Ye must not die ! Long as the dim robes of the Ages trail O'er IDA'S steep, or TEMPE'S flowery vale, Ye shall not die ! Your...‎

Page 87 - Time clothes himself in gray when his topmost deeds of wisest strength are to be done, and, in the language of another daring Singer, to whom, like this Robin, our new world has given birth, we would address thee on this dreadful pause betwixt Sublimity and Death : " Then let the sunset fall and flush Life's Dial ! No matter how the years may smite my frame, And cast a piteous blank upon my eyes That seek in vain the old, accustomed stars, Which skies hold over blue Winandermere, Be sure that I a...‎

Page 25 - Far in the melancholy North, where God Walks forth alone upon the desolate seas — They slumber still : .Sleep on, O passionless dead ! Ye make our world sublime : ye have a power And majesty the living never hold. Here Avarice shall forget his den of gold ; Here Lust his beautiflil victim, and hot Hate His crouching foe.‎

Page 52 - Roman smote his mailed hand On the gold portals of the dreaming East ; Before the Pleiad, in white trance of song, Beyond her choir of stars went wandering. The great old Trees, ranked on these hills of Death, Have melancholy hymns about all this ; And when the Moon walks her inheritance With slow, imperial pace, the Trees look up And chant in solemn cadence. Come and hear. " O patient Moon ! go not behind a cloud, But listen to our words. We, too, are old, Though not so old as thou. The ancient...‎

Bibliographic information

• Title: Meditations in America, and Other Poems
• Author: William Ross Wallace
• Edition: 2
• Publisher: C. Scribner, 1851
• Original from: the New York Public Library
• Digitized: Nov 29, 2006
• Length: 143 pages