Thou comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain, With banners, by great gales incessant fanned, Brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand, And stately oxen harnessed to thy wain! Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne,
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But front their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms.
Sweet the memory is to me Of a land beyond the sea, Where the waves and mountains meet, Where amid her mulberry-trees Sits Amalfi in the heat, Bathing ever her white feet In the tideless summer seas.
I stand again on the familiar shore, And hear the waves of the distracted sea Piteously calling and lamenting thee, And waiting restless at thy cottage door. The rocks, the sea-weed on the ocean floor, The willows in the meadow, and the free
When the summer fields are mown, When the birds are fledged and flown, And the dry leaves strew the path; With the falling of the snow, With the cawing of the crow, Once again the fields we mow
On the green little isle of Inchkenneth, Who is it that walks by the shore, So gay with his Highland blue bonnet, So brave with his targe and claymore?
The sun is set; and in his latest beams Yon little cloud of ashen gray and gold, Slowly upon the amber air unrolled, The falling mantle of the Prophet seems. From the dim headlands many a light-house gleams,
As the dim twilight shrouds The mountain's purple crest, And Summer's white and folded clouds Are glowing in the west, Loud shouts come up the rocky dell, And voices hail the evening-bell.
I said unto myself, if I were dead, What would befall these children? What would be Their fate, who now are looking up to me For help and furtherance? Their lives, I said, Would be a volume wherein I have read But the first chapters, and no longer see
'A soldier of the Union mustered out,' Is the inscription on an unknown grave At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave, Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scout Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout
Simon Danz has come home again, From cruising about with his buccaneers; He has singed the beard of the King of Spain, And carried away the Dean of Jaen And sold him in Algiers.