Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Astraea: The Balance Of Illusions</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">WHAT secret charm, long whispering in mine ear,<br>Allures, attracts, compels, and chains me here,<br>Where murmuring echoes call me to resign<br>Their sacred haunts to sweeter lips than mine;<br>Where silent pathways pierce the solemn shade,<br>In whose still depths my feet have never strayed;<br>Here, in the home where grateful children meet<br>And I, half alien, take the stranger's seat,<br>Doubting, yet hoping that the gift I bear<br>May keep its bloom in this unwonted air?<br>Hush, idle fancy, with thy needless art,<br>Speak from thy fountains, O my throbbing<br>heart!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Say, shall I trust these trembling lips to tell<br>The fireside tale that memory knows so well?<br>How, in the days of Freedom's dread campaign,<br>A home-bred schoolboy left his village plain,<br>Slow faring southward, till his wearied feet<br>Pressed the worn threshold of this fair retreat;<br>How, with his comely face and gracious mien,<br>He joined the concourse of the classic green,<br>Nameless, unfriended, yet by nature blest<br>With the rich tokens that she loves the best;<br>The flowing locks, his youth's redundant crown,<br>Smoothed o'er a brow unfurrowed by a frown;<br>The untaught smile that speaks so passing<br>plain A world all hope, a past without a stain;<br>The clear-hued cheek, whose burning current glows<br>Crimson in action, carmine in repose;<br>Gifts such as purchase, with unminted gold,<br>Smiles from the young and blessings from the old.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Say, shall my hand with pious love restore<br>The faint, far pictures time beholds no more?<br>How the grave Senior, he whose later fame<br>Stamps on our laws his own undying name,<br>Saw from on high, with half paternal joy,<br>Some spark of promise in the studious boy,<br>And bade him enter, with benignant tone,<br>Those stately precincts which he called his own,<br>Where the fresh student and the youthful sage<br>Read by one taper from the common page; <br>How the true comrade, whose maturer date<br>Graced the Urge honors of his ancient State,<br>Sought his young friendship, which through every change<br>No time could weaken, no remove estrange; <br>How the great MASTER, reverend, solemn, wise,<br>Fixed on his face those calm, majestic eyes,<br>Full of grave meaning, where a child might read<br>The Hebraist's patience and the Pilgrim's creed,<br>But warm with flashes of parental fire<br>That drew the stripling to his second sire; <br>How kindness ripened, till the youth might dare<br>Take the low seat beside his sacred chair,<br>While the gray scholar, bending o'er the young,<br>Spelled the square types of Abraham's ancient tongue,<br>Or with mild rapture stooped devoutly o'er<br>His small coarse leaf, alive with curious lore:<br>Tales of grim judges, at whose awful beck<br>Flashed the broad blade across a royal neck,<br>Or learned dreams of Israel's long lost child<br>Found in the wanderer of the western wild.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Dear to his age were memories such as these,<br>Leaves of his June in life's autumnal breeze;<br>Such were the tales that won my boyish ear,<br>Told in low tones that evening loves to hear.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus in the scene I pass so lightly o'er,<br>Trod for a moment, then beheld no more,<br>Strange shapes and dim, unseen by other eyes,<br>Through the dark portals of the past arise;<br>I see no more the fair embracing throng,<br>I hear no echo to my saddened song,<br>No more I heed the kind or curious gaze,<br>The voice of blame, the rustling thrill of praise;<br>Alone, alone, the awful past I tread<br>White with the marbles of the slumbering dead; <br>One shadowy form my dreaming eyes behold<br>That leads my footsteps as it led of old,<br>One floating voice, amid the silence heard,<br>Breathes in my ear love's long unspoken word:<br>These are the scenes thy youthful eyes have known;<br>My heart's warm pulses claim them as its own!<br>The sapling, compassed in thy fingers' clasp,<br>My arms scarce circle in their twice-told grasp,<br>Vet in each leaf of yon o'ershadowing tree<br>I read a legend that was traced by thee.<br>Year after year the living: wave has beat<br>These smooth-worn channels with its trampling feet,<br>Yet in each line that scores the grassy sod<br>I see the pathway where thy feet have trod.<br>Though from the scene that hears my faltering lay.<br>The few that loved thee long have passed away,<br>Thy sacred presence all the landscape tills,<br>Its groves and plains and adamantine hills!<br>Ye who have known the sudden tears that flow,<br>Sad tears, yet sweet, the dews of twilight woe,<br>When, led by chance, your wandering eye has crossed<br>Some poor memorial of the loved and lost,<br>Bear with my weakness as I look around<br>On the dear relics of this holy ground,<br>These bowery cloisters, shadowed and serene,<br>My dreams have pictured ere mine eyes have seen.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And oh, forgive me, if the flower I brought<br>Droops in my hand beside this burning thought;<br>The hopes and fears that marked this destined hour,<br>The chill of doubt, the startled throb of power,<br>The flush of pride, the trembling glow of shame,<br>All fade away and leave my FATHER'S name!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What life is this, that spreads in sudden birth<br>Its plumes of light around a new-born earth?<br>Is this the sun that brought the unwelcome day,<br>Pallid and glimmering with hi- lifeless ray,<br>Or through the sash that bars yon narrow cage<br>Slanted, intrusive, on the opened page?<br>Is this soft breath the same complaining gale<br>That filled my slumbers with its murmuring wail?<br>Is this green mantle of elastic sod<br>The same brown desert with its frozen clod,<br>Where the last ridges of the dingy snow<br>Lie till the windflower blooms unstained below?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus to my heart its wonted tides return<br>When sullen Winter breaks his crystal urn,<br>And o'er the turf in wild profusion showers<br>Its dewy leaflets and ambrosial flowers.<br>In vacant rapture for a while I range<br>Through the wide scene of universal change,<br>Till, as the statue in its nerves of stone<br>Felt the new senses wakening one by one,<br>Each long closed inlet finds its destined ray<br>Through the dark curtain Spring has rent away.<br>I crush the buds the clustering lilacs bear;<br>The same sweet fragrance that I loved is there;<br>The same fresh hues each opening disk reveals;<br>Soft as of old each silken petal feels;<br>The birch's rind its flavor still retains,<br>Its boughs still ringing with the self-same strains;<br>Above, around, rekindling Nature claims<br>Her glorious altars wreathed in living flames;<br>Undimmed, unshadowed, far as morning shines<br>Feeds with fresh incense her eternal shrines.<br>Lost in her arms, her burning life I share,<br>Breathe the wild freedom of her perfumed air,<br>From Heaven's fair face the long-drawn shadows roll,<br>And all its sunshine floods my opening soul!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">See, while I speak, my fireside joys return,<br>The lamp rekindles and the ashes burn,<br>The dream of summer fades before their ray,<br>As in red firelight sunshine dies away. <br>A two-fold picture; ere the first was gone,<br>The deepening outline of the next was drawn,<br>And wavering fancy hardly dares to choose<br>The first or last of her dissolving views.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">No Delphic sage is wanted to divine<br>The shape of Truth beneath my gauzy line;<br>Yet there are truths, like schoolmates, once well known,<br>But half remembered, not enough to own,<br>That, lost from sight in life's bewildering train,<br>May be, like strangers, introduced again,<br>Dressed in new feathers, as from time to time<br>May please our friends, the milliners of rhyme.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Trust not, it says, the momentary hue<br>Whose false complexion paints the present view;<br>Red, yellow, violet stain the rainbow's light,<br>The prism dissolves, and all again is white.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But how, alas! among our eager race,<br>Shall smiling candor show her girlish face?<br>What place is secret to the meddling crew.<br>Whose trade is settling what we all shall do?<br>What verdict sacred from the busy fools,<br>That sell the jargon of their outlaw schools?<br>What pulpit certain to be never vexed<br>With libels sanctioned by a holy text?<br>Where, my country, is the spot that yields<br>The freedom fought for on a hundred fields?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not one strong tyrant holds the servile chain,<br>Where all may vote and each may hope to reign;<br>One sturdy cord a single limb may bind.<br>And leave the captive only half confined,<br>But the free spirit finds its legs and wings<br>Tied with unnumbered Lilliputian strings,<br>Which, like the spider's undiscovered fold,<br>In countless meshes round the prisoner rolled,<br>With silken pressure that he scarce can feel,<br>Clamp every fibre as in bands of steel!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Hard is the task to point in civil phrase<br>One's own dear people s foolish works or ways; <br>Woe to the friend that marks a touchy fault,<br>Himself obnoxious to the world's assault!<br>Think what an earthquake is a nation's hiss.<br>That takes its circuit through a land like this;<br>Count with the census, would you be precise,<br>From sea to sea, from oranges to ice; <br>A thousand myriads are its virile lungs, <br>A thousand myriads its contralto tongues!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And oh, remember the indignant press;<br>Honey is bitter to its fond caress,<br>But the black venom that its hate lets fall<br>Would shame to sweetness the hyena's gall!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Briefly and gently let the task be tried<br>To touch some frailties on their tender side;<br>Not to dilate on each imagined wrong,<br>And spoil at once our temper and our song,<br>But once or twice a passing gleam to throw<br>On some rank failings ripe enough to show,<br>Patterns of others, made of common stuff,<br>The world will furnish parallels enough,<br>Such as bewilder their contracted view, <br>Who make one pupil do the work of two:<br>Who following nature, where her tracks divide.<br>Drive all their passions on the narrower side,<br>And pour the phials of their virtuous wrath<br>On half mankind that take the wider path.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nature is liberal to her inmost soul,<br>She loves alike the tropic and the pole,<br>The storm's wild anthem, and the sunshine's calm,<br>The arctic fungus, and the desert palm;<br>Loves them alike, and wills that each maintain<br>Its destined share of her divided reign;<br>No creeping moss refuse her crystal gem,<br>No soaring pine her cloudy diadem!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Alas! her children, borrowing but in part<br>The flowing pulses of her generous heart,<br>Shame their kind mother with eternal strife<br>At all the crossings of their mingled life ;<br>Each age, each people finds its ready shifts<br>To quarrel stoutly o'er her choicest gifts.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">History can tell of early ages dim,<br>When man's chief glory was in strength of limb;<br>Then the best patriot gave the hardest knocks,<br>The height of virtue was to fell an ox;<br>Ill fared the babe of questionable mould, <br>Whom its stern father happened to behold;<br>In vain the mother with her ample vest<br>Hid the poor nursling on her throbbing breast; <br>No tears could save him from the kitten's fate.<br>To live an insult to the warlike state.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This weakness passed, and nations owned once more,<br>Man was still human, measuring five feet four,<br>The anti-cripples ceased to domineer.<br>And owned Napoleon worth a grenadier.<br>In these mild times the ancient bully's sport<br>Would lead its hero to a well known court;<br>Olympian athletes, though the pride of Greece,<br>Must face the Justice if they broke the peace.<br>And valor find some inconvenient checks.<br>If strolling Thesens met Policeman X.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Yet when thy champion's stormy task is done,<br>The frigate silenced and the fortress won,<br>When toil-worn valor claims his laurel wreath.<br>His reeking cutlass slumbering in its sheath,<br>The fierce declaimer shall be heard once more.<br>Whose twang was smothered by the conflict's roar;<br>Heroes shall fall that strode unharmed away<br>Through the red heaps of many a doubtful day,<br>Hacked in his sermons, riddled in his prayers,<br>The broadcloth slashing what the broadsword spares!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Untaught by trial, ignorance might suppose<br>That all our fighting must be done with blows;<br>Alas! not so; between the lips and brain <br>A dread artillery masks its loaded train;<br>The smooth portcullis of the smiling face<br>Veils the grim battery with deceptive grace,<br>But in the flashes of its opened fire,<br>Truth, Honor, Justice, Peace and Love expire.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If generous fortune give me leave to choose<br>My saucy neighbors barefoot or in shoes,<br>I leave the hero blustering while he dares<br>On platforms furnished with posterior stairs,<br>Till prudence drives him to his 'earnest' legs<br>With large bequest of disappointed eggs,<br>And take the brawler whose unstudied dress<br>Becomes him better, and protects him less;<br>Give me the bullying of the scoundrel crew,<br>If swaggering virtue won't insult me too!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Come, let us breathe; a something not divine<br>Has mingled, bitter, with the flowing line.<br>Pause for a moment while our soul forgets<br>The noisy tribe in panta-loons or -lets;<br>Nor pass, ungrateful, by the debt we owe<br>To those who teach us half of all we know,<br>Not in rude license, or unchristian scorn,<br>But hoping, loving, pitying, while they warn!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sweep out the pieces! Hound a careless room<br>The feather-duster follows up the broom;<br>If the last target took a round of grape<br>To knock its beauty something out of shape,<br>The next asks only, if the listener please, <br>A schoolboy's blowpipe and a gill of peas.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This creeping object, caught upon the brink<br>Of an old teacup, filled with muddy ink,<br>Lives on a leaf that buds from time to time<br>In certain districts of a temperate clime.<br>O'er this he toils in silent corners snug,<br>And leaves a track behind him, like a slug;<br>The leaves he stains a humbler tribe devours,<br>Thrown off in monthly or in weekly showers;<br>Himself kept savage on a starving fare,<br>Of such exuviae as his friends can spare.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Let the bug drop, and view him if we can<br>In his true aspect as a quasi man.<br>The little wretch, whose terebrating powers<br>Would bore a Paixhan in a dozen hours,<br>Is called a CRITIC by the heavy friends<br>That help to pay his minus dividends.<br>The pseudo-critic-editorial race<br>Owns no allegiance but the law of place;<br>Each to his region sticks through thick and thin,<br>Stiff as a beetle spiked upon a pin.<br>Plant him in Boston, and his sheet he fills<br>With all the slipslop of his threefold hills,<br>Talks as if Nature Kept her choicest smiles<br>Within his radius of a dozen miles,<br>And nations waited till his next Review<br>Had made it plain what Providence must do.<br>Would you believe him, water is not damp<br>Except in buckets with the Hingham stamp.<br>And Heaven should build the walls of Paradise<br>Of Quincy granite lined with Wenham ice.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But Hudson's banks, with more congenial skies,<br>Swell the small creature to alarming size: <br>A gayer pattern wraps his flowery chest, <br>A sham more brilliant sparkles on his breast,<br>An eyeglass, hanging from a gilded chain,<br>Taps the white leg that tips his rakish cane;<br>Strings of new names, the glories of the age,<br>Hang up to dry on his exterior page,<br>Titanic pygmies, shining lights obscure,<br>His favored sheets have managed to secure,<br>Whose wide renown beyond their own abode<br>Extends for miles along the Harlaem road; <br>New radiance lights his patronizing smile,<br>New airs distinguish his patrician style,<br>New sounds are mingled with his fatal hiss,<br>Oftenest 'provincial' and 'metropolis.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He cry 'provincial' with imperious brow!<br>The half-bred rogue, that groomed his mother's cow!<br>Fed on coarse tubers and Aeolian beans<br>Till clownish manhood crept among his teens,<br>When, after washing and unheard of pains<br>To lard with phrases his refractory brains, <br>A third-rate college licked him to the shape,<br>Not of the scholar, but the scholar's ape!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">God bless Manhattan! Let her fairly claim,<br>With all the honors due her ancient name,<br>Worth, wisdom, wealth, abounding and to spare,<br>Rags, riots, rogues, at least her honest share;<br>But not presume, because, by sad mischance,<br>The mobs of Paris wring the neck of France,<br>Fortune has ordered she shall turn the poise<br>Of thirty Empires with her Bowery boys!<br>The poorest hamlet on the mountain's side<br>Looks on her glories with a sister's pride; <br>When the first babes her fruitful ship-yards wean<br>Play round the breasts of Ocean's conquered queen,<br>The shout of millions, borne on every breeze,<br>Sweeps with EXCELSIOR o'er the enfranchised seas!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Yet not too rashly let her think to bind<br>Beneath her circlet all the nation's mind;<br>Our star-crowned mother, whose informing soul<br>Clings to no fragment, but pervades the whole,<br>Views with a smile the clerk of Maiden Lane,<br>Who takes her ventral ganglion for her brain!<br>No fables tell us of Minervas born<br>From bags of cotton or from sacks of corn;<br>The halls of Leyden Science used to cram,<br>While dulness snored in purse-proud Amsterdam!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But those old burghers had a foggy clime,<br>And better luck may come the second time;<br>What though some churls of doubtful sense declare<br>That poison lurks in her commercial air,<br>Her buds of genius dying premature,<br>From some malaria draining cannot cure;<br>Nay, that so dangerous is her golden soil,<br>Wnate'er she borrows she contrives to spoil;<br>That drooping minstrels in a few brief years<br>Lose their sweet voice, the gift of other spheres;<br>That wafted singing from their native shore,<br>They touch the Battery, and are heard no more;<br>By those twinned waves that wear the varied gleams<br>Beryl or sapphire mingles in their streams,<br>Till the fair sisters o'er her yellow sands,<br>Clasping their soft and snowy ruffled hands,<br>Lay on her footstool with their silver keys<br>Strength from the mountains, freedom from the seas,<br>Some future day may see her rise sublime<br>Above her counters, only give her time!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When our first Soldiers' swords of honor gild<br>The stately mansions that her tradesmen build;<br>When our first Statesmen take the Broadway track,<br>Our first Historians following at their back; <br>When our first Painters, dying, leave behind<br>On her proud walls the shadows of their mind; <br>When our first Poets flock from farthest scenes<br>To take in hand her pictured Magazines; <br>When our first Scholars are content to dwell<br>Where their own printers teach them how to spell; <br>When world-known Science crowds toward her gates,<br>Then shall the children of our hundred States<br>Hail her a true METROPOLIS of men,<br>The nation's centre. Then, and not till then!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The song is failing. Yonder clanging tower<br>Shakes in its cup the more than brimming hour;<br>The full-length gallery which the fates deny, <br>A colored Moral briefly must supply.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The song is passing. Let its meaning rise<br>To loftier notes before its echo dies,<br>Nor leave, ungracious, in its parting train. <br>A trivial flourish or discordant strain.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">These lines may teach, rough-spoken though they be,<br>Thy gentle creed, divinest Charity!<br>Truth is at heart not always as she seems,<br>Judged by our sleeping or our waking dreams.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The song is hushed. Another moment parts<br>This breathing zone, this belt of living hearts;<br>Ah, think not thus the parting moment ends<br>The soul's embrace of new discovered friends.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472373" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sleep on my heart, thou long expected hour,<br>Time's new-born daughter, with thine infant dower,<br>One sad, sweet look from those expiring charms<br>The clasping centuries strangle in their arms,<br>Dreams of old halls, and shadowy arches green,<br>And kindly faces loved as soon as seen!<br>Sleep, till the fires of manhood fade away,<br>The sprinkled locks have saddened into gray,<br>And age, oblivious, blends thy memories old<br>With hoary legends that his sire has told!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Oliver+Wendell+Holmes">Oliver Wendell Holmes</a></strong></div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black