Verbal Expression

by Emily Dickinson 

You left me, sweet, two legacies, –
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

by Emily Dickinson

A precious, mouldering pleasure ‘t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty.
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true;
He lived where dreams were sown.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.

by Edgar Allan Poe
  The ring is on my hand,
    And the wreath is on my brow;
  Satins and jewels grand
  Are all at my command.
    And I am happy now.

  And my lord he loves me well;
    But, when first he breathed his vow,
  I felt my bosom swell–
  For the words rang as a knell,
  And the voice seemed _his_ who fell
  In the battle down the dell,
    And who is happy now.

  But he spoke to reassure me,
    And he kissed my pallid brow,
  While a reverie came o’er me,
  And to the churchyard bore me,
  And I sighed to him before me,
  Thinking him dead D’Elormie,
    “Oh, I am happy now!”

  And thus the words were spoken,
    And thus the plighted vow,
  And, though my faith be broken,
  And, though my heart be broken,
  Behold the golden keys
    That _proves_ me happy now!

  Would to God I could awaken
    For I dream I know not how,
  And my soul is sorely shaken
  Lest an evil step be taken,–
  Lest the dead who is forsaken
    May not be happy now.

by Edgar Allan Poe 
  “Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,
      “Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
    Through all the flimsy things we see at once
      As easily as through a Naples bonnet–
      Trash of all trash!–how _can_ a lady don it?
    Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff–
    Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
      Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.”
    And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
    The general tuckermanities are arrant
    Bubbles–ephemeral and _so_ transparent–
      But _this is_, now–you may depend upon it–
    Stable, opaque, immortal–all by dint
    Of the dear names that lie concealed within’t.

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

by Horatio Alger, Jr.

A violet grew by the river-side,
  And gladdened all hearts with its bloom;
While over the fields, on the scented air,
  It breathed a rich perfume.
But the clouds grew dark in the angry sky,
  And its portals were opened wide;
And the heavy rain beat down the flower
  That grew by the river-side.

Not far away in a pleasant home,
  There lived a little boy,
Whose cheerful face and childish grace
  Filled every heart with joy.
He wandered one day to the river’s verge,
  With no one near to save;
And the heart that we loved with a boundless love
  Was stilled in the restless wave.

The sky grew dark to our tearful eyes,
  And we bade farewell to joy;
For our hearts were bound by a sorrowful tie
  To the grave of the little boy.
The birds still sing in the leafy tree
  That shadows the open door;
We heed them not, for we think of the voice
  That we shall hear no more.

We think of him at eventide,
  And gaze on his vacant chair
With a longing heart that will scarce believe
  That Charlie is not there.
We seem to hear his ringing laugh,
  And his bounding step at the door;
But, alas! there comes the sorrowful thought,
  We shall never hear them more!                               

We shall walk sometimes to his little grave,
  In the pleasant summer hours;
We will speak his name in a softened voice,
  And cover his grave with flowers;
We will think of him in his heavenly home,–
  In his heavenly home so fair;
And we will trust with a hopeful trust
  That we shall meet him there.

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

by Edgar Allan Poe
  A dark unfathomed tide
  Of interminable pride–
  A mystery, and a dream,
  Should my early life seem;
  I say that dream was fraught
  With a wild and waking thought
  Of beings that have been,
  Which my spirit hath not seen,
  Had I let them pass me by,
  With a dreaming eye!
  Let none of earth inherit
  That vision on my spirit;
  Those thoughts I would control,
  As a spell upon his soul:
  For that bright hope at last
  And that light time have past,
  And my wordly rest hath gone
  With a sigh as it passed on:
  I care not though it perish
  With a thought I then did cherish.

by Edgar Allan Poe
  Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
  That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
    The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
    To his own native shore.

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
    To the glory that was Greece,
  To the grandeur that was Rome.

  Lo! in yon brilliant window niche,
    How statue-like I see thee stand,
    The agate lamp within thy hand!
  Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
    Are Holy Land!

by Edgar Allan Poe
    “Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”

     Servius
“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those “Contes Moraux” which in all
our translations we have insisted upon calling “Moral Tales,” as if in
mockery of their spirit–”la musique est le seul des talens qui jouisse
de lui-meme: tous les autres veulent des temoins.” He here confounds
the pleasure derivable from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating
them. No more than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of
complete enjoyment where there is no second party to appreciate its
exercise; and it is only in common with other talents that it produces
effects which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the
raconteur has either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in
its expression to his national love of point, is doubtless the very
tenable one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly
estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition in this form
will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake and
for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach
of fallen mortality, and perhaps only one, which owes even more than
does music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness
experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man
who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude
behold that glory. To me at least the presence, not of human life only,
but of life, in any other form than that of the green things which grow
upon the soil and are voiceless, is a stain upon the landscape, is at
war with the genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark
valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the
forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains
that look down upon all,–I love to regard these as themselves but the
colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole–a whole whose
form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all;
whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the
moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose
thought is that of a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies
are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our
own cognizance of the animalculæ which infest the brain, a being which
we in consequence regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the
same manner as these animalculæ must thus regard us.

Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every
hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood,
that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in
the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those
best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest
possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately such
as within a given surface to include the greatest possible amount of
matter; while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate
a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces
otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object
with God that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of
matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the endowment of matter
with vitality is a principle–indeed, as far as our judgments extend,
the leading principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely
logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where we
daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august. As we find
cycle within cycle without end, yet all revolving around one far-distant
centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the
same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all
within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring through
self-esteem in believing man, in either his temporal or future
destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of
the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul,
for no more profound reason than that he does not behold it in operation.

These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my meditations
among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers and the ocean, a
tinge of what the every-day world would not fail to term the fantastic.
My wanderings amid such scenes have been many and far-searching, and
often solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many
a dim deep valley, or gazed into the reflected heaven of many a bright
lake, has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have
strayed and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said,
in allusion to the well known work of Zimmermann, that “la solitude est
une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la solitude
est une belle chose”? The epigram cannot be gainsaid; but the necessity
is a thing that does not exist.

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of
mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarns
writhing or sleeping within all, that I chanced upon a certain rivulet
and island. I came upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw
myself upon the turf beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub,
that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only
should I look upon it, such was the character of phantasm which it wore.

On all sides, save to the west where the sun was about sinking, arose
the verdant walls of the forest. The little river which turned sharply
in its course, and was thus immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no
exit from its prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of
the trees to the east; while in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to
me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly
and continuously into the valley a rich golden and crimson waterfall
from the sunset fountains of the sky.

About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in, one
small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon the bosom of the
stream.

  So blended bank and shadow there,
  That each seemed pendulous in air–

so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely possible to
say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf its crystal
dominion began. My position enabled me to include in a single view both
the eastern and western extremities of the islet, and I observed a
singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was all one
radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the eye
of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. The grass was
short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were
lithe, mirthful, erect, bright, slender, and graceful, of eastern figure
and foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a
deep sense of life and joy about all, and although no airs blew from out
the heavens, yet everything had motion through the gentle sweepings to
and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for
tulips with wings.

The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade.
A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom, here pervaded all things.
The trees were dark in color and mournful in form and attitude–
wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes, that
conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the
deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly,
and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low
and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were
not, although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary
clambered. The shades of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and
seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element
with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower
and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth,
and thus became absorbed by the stream, while other shadows issued
momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus
entombed.

This idea having once seized upon my fancy greatly excited it, and I
lost myself forthwith in reverie. “If ever island were enchanted,” said
I to myself, “this is it. This is the haunt of the few gentle Fays who
remain from the wreck of the race. Are these green tombs theirs?–or do
they yield up their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In dying,
do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering unto God little by
little their existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow,
exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting tree is to
the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by what it preys
upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the death which engulfs it?”

As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly to
rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the island, bearing
upon their bosom large dazzling white flakes of the bark of the
sycamore, flakes which, in their multiform positions upon the water, a
quick imagination might have converted into anything it pleased; while I
thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays
about whom I had been pondering, made its way slowly into the darkness
from out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect in
a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an
oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude
seemed indicative of joy, but sorrow deformed it as she passed within
the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and
re-entered the region of light. “The revolution which has just been made
by the Fay,” continued I musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of
her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She
is a year nearer unto death: for I did not fail to see that as she came
into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the
dark water, making its blackness more black.”

And again the boat appeared and the Fay, but about the attitude of the
latter there was more of care and uncertainty and less of elastic joy.
She floated again from out the light and into the gloom (which deepened
momently), and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony water, and
became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she made the
circuit of the island (while the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and
at each issuing into the light there was more sorrow about her person,
while it grew feebler and far fainter and more indistinct, and at each
passage into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became
whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length, when the sun had utterly
departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self, went
disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and
that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for darkness fell over all
things, and I beheld her magical figure no more.