Poetry collection
Stay in town, little wight,
Safe at home:
If you roam,
The cranes who delight
Upon pygmies to sup,
Will gobble you up.
Stay at home.
From: Appleton, William Hyde (ed.), Greek Poets in English Verse by Various Translators, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston and New York, p. 307.
(https://archive.org/details/greekpoetsinengl00appl/)
Date: 6th century (original in Greek); 1849 (translation in English)
By: Julianus Antecessor (6th century)
Translated by: Henry Wellesley (1791-1866)
On the casement, closed and lonesome,
Is falling the autumn rain,
And my heart to-night is heavy
With a sense of unquiet pain.
Not that the leaves are dying
In the kiss of the traitor frost,
And not that the summer flowers
On the bitter winds are tossed.
And not that the reaper’s singing
The time no longer cheers,
Bringing home through the mellow starlight
The sheaves and the yellow ears.
No, not from these am I sighing,
As the hours pass slow and dull,
For God in his own time maketh
All seasons beautiful.
But one of our household number
Sits not by the hearth-fire’s light,
And right on her pathway beating
Is the rain of this autumn night.
And therefore my heart is heavy
With a sense of unquiet pain,
For, but Heaven can tell if the parted
Shall meet in the earth again.
But knowing God’s love extendeth
Wherever his children are,
And tenderly round about them
Are the arms of his watchful care;
With him be the time and the season
Of our meeting again with thee,
Whether here on these earthly borders,
Or the shore of the world to be.
From: Cary, Alice and Cary, Phoebe, The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, 1850, Moss & Brother, Philadelphia, pp. 239-240.
(http://name.umdl.umich.edu/aea7901.0001.001)
Date: 1849
By: Phoebe Cary (1824-1871)
Once more the shadows darken
Upon life’s solemn stream—
Once more I’m in my chamber
To ponder and to dream.
Down in the mist-white valley,
Across the hills afar,
The rosy light is gleaming
From Love’s descending star.
I hear from yonder parlour
A prattler cry, “He’s come!”
Oh, there’s a world of comfort—
I wish I had a home!
All last night, round about me
The lights of memory streamed,
And my heart to long-lost music
Kept beating as I dreamed.
We live with spectres haunted
That we cannot exorcise—
A pale and shadowy army
Between us and the skies.
Conjured by mortal weakness,
In their cerements they start
From the lonesome burial-places
Of the dead hopes of the heart.
They will meet thee, fellow-pilgrim,
For their graves are everywhere,
And thou canst not lay them better
Than by labour which is prayer.
From: Cary, Alice and Cary, Phoebe, The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, 1850, Moss & Brother, Philadelphia, pp. 158-159.
(http://name.umdl.umich.edu/aea7901.0001.001)
Date: 1849
By: Alice Cary (1820-1871)
Day after day, and year by year,
Chattering, chirping, far and near,
Some Grasshoppers a house surround
And din the owner with the sound.
These grasshoppers delight in trees
To chirp and chatter at their ease:
So quoth our friend, “You villain vermin!
This nuisance I’ll at once determine:
Your Trees I’ll fell, and then you may
In humbler quarters sing away!”
Hush, Locrians! or far and near
Dwellings and Trees may disappear;
Then Grasshoppers, ill-omen’d sound,
Shall sing to You,—and from the ground.
From: Stesichorus and Bromhead, Edward Ffrench (ed. and transl.), The Remains of Stesichorus, in an English Version, 1849, p. 23.
(https://books.google.com.au/books?id=NkwEAAAAQAAJ)
Date: 6th century BCE (original in Greek); 1849 (translation in English)
By: Stesichorus (c630 BCE-555 BCE)
Translated by: Edward Thomas Ffrench Bromhead (1789-1855)
It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold;
“Peace on the earth, good will to men
From heaven’s all-gracious King” —
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.
Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its Babel-sounds
The blessed angels sing.
But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; —
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!
And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing; —
Oh, rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing!
For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When Peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.
From: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem1834.html
Date: 1849
By: Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876)
To _____________.
If Virtue be measured by what we resist,
When against Inclination we strive,
You and I have been proved, we may fairly insist,
The most virtuous mortals alive !
Now Virtue, we know, is the brightest of pearls,
But as Pleasure is hard of evasion.
Should we envy, or pity, the stoical churls
Who never have known a temptation?
From: Saxe, John G, Poems, Ticknor and Fields: Boston, 1860, p. 82.
(http://archive.org/stream/poemsbyjohngsaxe00saxe#page/82/mode/2up)
Date: 1849
By: John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)
Good evening, good night,
Provided with roses,
Covered with carnations,
Slip under the blanket.
In the morning, if God wills,
You will wake again.
In the morning, if God wills,
You will wake again.
Good evening, good night,
Watched by little angels;
They show in your dream
The Christmas tree.
Just sleep blessed and sweet,
See Paradise in your dream.
Just sleep blessed and sweet,
See Paradise in your dream.
From: http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=382&c=38
Date: 1849 (in German)
By: Georg Scherer (1824-1909)
Translated by: Gary McGath (?- )
From Troubles of The World 