The Friends

Share not thy joy with me, O friend the best,
Thou may'st forget me then--I shall not care;
But shut me from thy grief the bitterest,
And mine own grief would be too great to bear.

poem by Charles Hanson Towne
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Love of Beauty

Who loves all beauty loves beyond that we see;
The gods give him a vision doubly blest;
He sees the bloom upon the hawthorn-tree,
But blossoms, too, that are not quite expressed.

He hears the music in the lyric rain,
The lark's enraptured notes that wake the dawn;
But far behind them one diviner strain
That is not uttered till the first is gone.

poem by Charles Hanson Towne
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The Gladness of Spring

When Spring, with blossom-haunted lanes,
With sudden gusts of rippling rains,
Came dancing down the glad young year,
How soon my heart forgot its fear!

When I had heard the lyric note
That floated from the robin's throat,
How soon the sad song in my breast
Sought a deep silence, a deep rest!

Now who had dreamed the April rain
Could cleanse a heart of all its pain?
And who had thought one little bird
Could hush a soul's discordant word?

poem by Charles Hanson Towne
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After Reading Keats

Down his great corridors of sumptuous sound
Today I wandered once again. Each word
Seemed like the lyric rapture of a bird
Singing in Spring a-bove the burgeoning ground.
O once again that old delight I found,
Once more the marvel of his voice I heard,
Until my spirit with new joy was stirred,
Hearing such music through his halls resound.
How beautiful thy palace, Poet blest!--
That room wherein is set thy Grecian Urn,
Thy Nightingale that sings at set of sun
Out in thy garden where my tired feet turn;
And in one chamber, back from his long quest,
That passionate lover, young Endymion!

poem by Charles Hanson Towne
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A Distant Spring

I who love the Spring so well
Shall be sleeping, some glad day,
When her hosts come back to dwell
In their old, familiar way.

I shall live, alas! no more
In some distant April hour,
When the Spring finds wide her door,
Calling leaf, and bloom, and flower.

I shall sleep--but I shall dream
In my home beneath the ground,
And my slumbering heart shall teem
With its visions deep, profound.

I shall know, ere you will guess
(Though with life I have no part),
What new golden loveliness
Stirs within the old earth's heart.

[...] Read more

poem by Charles Hanson Towne
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