Christopher Pearse Cranch

UNBIDDEN to the feast where friends have brought,
To greet thy seventy years, their wreaths of rhyme, —
For that thy form erect such weight of time
Should bear, was never present to my thought, —…

WARM, generous and young in heart and brain,
A wise, ripe scholar of the antique mould,
Had he but chosen he might have enrolled
His name among philosophers who gain…

WHIRLING along its living freight, it came,
Hot, panting, fierce, yet docile to command--
The roaring monster, blazing through the land
Athwart the night, with crest of smoke and flame;…

A Moorish BalladIN Grenada reigned Mohammed,
Sixth who bore the name was he;
But the rightful king, Prince Yousuf,
Pined in long captivity:…

A GROAN from a dim-lit upper room —
A stealthy step on the stairs in the gloom —
A hurried glance to left, to right
In the court below — then out in the night…

(A Hope)BEFORE our eyes a pageant rolled
Whose banners every land unfurled;
And as it passed, its splendors told
The art and glory of the world.…

BLACK in the midnight lies the City vast.
Its dim horizon from my window high
I see shut in beneath a misty sky
Red with the light a million lamp-fires cast…

CAN one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom
That promised fruit of nobler worth than all
He yet had given, drop thus with sudden fall?
The busy brain no more its work resume?…

You were not born to hide such gifts as yours
'Neath dreary law-books, nor amid the dust
And dry routine of desks to sit and rust
Where clerks plod through their tasks on office-floors.…

GRAY-HEADED POETS, whom the full years bless
With life and health and chance still multiplied
To hold your forward course — fame and success
Close at your side;…

WITH what a live intelligence the flame
Glows and leaps up in spires of flickering red,
And turns the coal just now so dull and dead
To a companion — not like those who came…

FRIEND, dear as Memory's joys! of life that 's past
A part, and part of better life to come,
If life to come there be, in some dear home
Beyond the rigid clouds that overcast…