DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Inward Judge
by John Greenleaf Whittier

From Institutes of Manu.
The soul itself its awful witness is.
Say not in evil doing, "No one sees,"
And so offend the conscious One within,
Whose ear can hear the silences of sin.
Ere they find voice, whose eyes unsleeping see
The secret motions of iniquity.
Nor in thy folly say, "I am alone."
For, seated in thy heart, as on a throne,
The ancient Judge and Witness liveth still,
To note thy act and thought; and as thy ill
Or good goes from thee, far beyond thy reach,
The solemn Doomsman's seal is set on each
The Deacon's Daughter.
by Marietta Holley

The spare-room windows wide were raised,
And you could look that summer day
On pastures green, and sunny hills,
And low rills wandering away.
Near by, the square front yard was sweet
With rose and caraway.
Upon a couch drawn near the light,
The Deacon's only daughter lay,
Bending upon the distant hills
Her eyes of dark and thoughtful gray;
The blue veins on her forehead shone
'Twas wasted so away.
She moved, and from her slender hand
Fell off her mother's wedding-ring;
She smiled into her father's face - 
"So drops from me each earthly thing;
My hands are free to hold the flowers
Of the eternal spring."
She had ever walked in quiet ways,
Not over beds of flowery ease,
But Sundays in the village choir
She sweetly sang of "ways of peace,"
Of "ways of peace and pleasantness,"
She trod such paths as these.
No sweeter voice in all the choir
Praised God in innocence and truth,
The Deacon in his straight-backed pew
Had dreams of her he lost in youth,
And thought of fair-faced Hebrew maids - 
Of Rachel, and of Ruth.
But she had faded, day by day,
Growing more mild, and pure, and sweet,
As nearer to her ear there came
A distant sea's mysterious beat,
Till now this summer afternoon,
Its waters touched her feet.
Upon the painted porch without
Two women stood, and whispered low,
They thought "she'd go out with the day,"
They said, "the Deacon's wife went so."
And then they gently pitied him - 
"It was a dreadful blow."
"But she was good, she was prepared,
She would be better off than here,"
And then they thought "'twas strange that he,
Her father, had not shed a tear,"
And then they talked of news, and all
The promise of the year.
Her father sat beside the bed,
Holding her cold hands tenderly,
And to the everlasting hills
He mutely turned his eyes away:
"My God, my Shelter, and my Rock,
Oh shadow me to-day!"
He knew not when she crossed the stream,
And passed into the land unseen,
So gently did she go from him
Into its pastures still and green;
Into the land of pure delight,
And Jordan rolled between.
Then knelt he down beside his dead,
His white locks lit with sunset's flame:
"My God! oh leave me not alone - 
But blessed be Thy holy name."
The golden gates were lifted up
The King of Glory came.
The Soul Should Always Stand Ajar,
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

The soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
Depart, before the host has slid
The bolt upon the door,
To seek for the accomplished guest, --
Her visitor no more.
The Alabaster Box
by William Arthur Dunkerley (John Oxenham)

The spikenard was not wasted;--
All down the tale of years,
The fragrance of that broken alabaster
Still clings to Mary's memory,
As clung its perfume sweet unto her Master.
Not less than Martha,
Mary served her Lord,
Although she but sat worshipping,
While Martha spread the board.
They also minister to Christ,
And render noblest duty,
Whose sweet hands touch life's common rounds
To Fragrance and to Beauty.
The Spirit of the Unborn Babe
by Robert William Service

The Spirit of the Unborn Babe peered through the window-pane,
Peered through the window-pane that glowed like beacon in the night;
For, oh, the sky was desolate and wild with wind and rain;
And how the little room was crammed with coziness and light!
Except the flirting of the fire there was no sound at all;
The Woman sat beside the hearth, her knitting on her knee;
The shadow of her husband's head was dancing on the wall;
She looked with staring eyes at it, she looked yet did not see.
She only saw a childish face that topped the table rim,
A little wistful ghost that smiled and vanished quick away;
And then because her tender eyes were flooding to the brim,
She lowered her head. . . . "Don't sorrow, dear," she heard him softly say;
"It's over now. We'll try to be as happy as before
(Ah! they who little children have, grant hostages to pain).
We gave Life chance to wound us once, but never, never more. . . ."
The Spirit of the Unborn Babe fled through the night again.
The Spirit of the Unborn Babe went wildered in the dark;
Like termagants the winds tore down and whirled it with the snow.
And then amid the writhing storm it saw a tiny spark,
A window broad, a spacious room all goldenly aglow,
A woman slim and Paris-gowned and exquisitely fair,
Who smiled with rapture as she watched her jewels catch the blaze;
A man in faultless evening dress, young, handsome, debonnaire,
Who smoked his cigarette and looked with frank admiring gaze.
"Oh, we are happy, sweet," said he; "youth, health, and wealth are ours.
What if a thousand toil and sweat that we may live at ease!
What if the hands are worn and torn that strew our path with flowers!
Ah, well! we did not make the world; let us not think of these.
Let's seek the beauty-spots of earth, Dear Heart, just you and I;
Let other women bring forth life with sorrow and with pain.
Above our door we'll hang the sign: 'No children need apply. . . .'"
The Spirit of the Unborn Babe sped through the night again.
The Spirit of the Unborn Babe went whirling on and on;
It soared above a city vast, it swept down to a slum;
It saw within a grimy house a light that dimly shone;
It peered in through a window-pane and lo! a voice said: "Come!"
And so a little girl was born amid the dirt and din,
And lived in spite of everything, for life is ordered so;
A child whose eyes first opened wide to swinishness and sin,
A child whose love and innocence met only curse and blow.
And so in due and proper course she took the path of shame,
And gladly died in hospital, quite old at twenty years;
And when God comes to weigh it all, ah! whose shall be the blame
For all her maimed and poisoned life, her torture and her tears?
For oh, it is not what we do, but what we have not done!
And on that day of reckoning, when all is plain and clear,
What if we stand before the Throne, blood-guilty every one? . . .
Maybe the blackest sins of all are Selfishness and Fear.
The Soul Unto Itself
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend, --
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.
Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear;
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.
Our State
by John Greenleaf Whittier

The South-land boasts its teeming cane,
The prairied West its heavy grain,
And sunset's radiant gates unfold
On rising marts and sands of gold!
Rough, bleak, and hard, our little State
Is scant of soil, of limits strait;
Her yellow sands are sands alone,
Her only mines are ice and stone!
From Autumn frost to April rain,
Too long her winter woods complain;
Fom budding flower to falling leaf,
Her summer time is all too brief.
Yet, on her rocks, and on her sands,
And wintry hills, the school-house stands,
And what her rugged soil denies,
The harvest of the mind supplies.
The riches of the Commonwealth
Are free, strong minds, and hearts of health;
And more to her than gold or grain,
The cunning hand and cultured brain.
For well she keeps her ancient stock,
The stubborn strength of Pilgrim Rock;
And still maintains, with milder laws,
And clearer light, the Good Old Cause!
Nor heeds the skeptic's puny hands,
While near her school the church-spire stands;
Nor fears the blinded bigot's rule,
While near her church-spire stands the school
The Spectral Horseman.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Posthumous Fragments Of Margaret Mcholson.
Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that noted Female who attempted the life of the King in 1786. Edited by John Fitzvictor.
[The "Posthumous Fragments", published at Oxford by Shelley, appeared in November, 1810.]
The Spectral Horseman.
What was the shriek that struck Fancy's ear
As it sate on the ruins of time that is past?
Hark! it floats on the fitful blast of the wind,
And breathes to the pale moon a funeral sigh.
It is the Benshie's moan on the storm,
Or a shivering fiend that thirsting for sin,
Seeks murder and guilt when virtue sleeps,
Winged with the power of some ruthless king,
And sweeps o'er the breast of the prostrate plain.
It was not a fiend from the regions of Hell
That poured its low moan on the stillness of night:
It was not a ghost of the guilty dead,
Nor a yelling vampire reeking with gore;
But aye at the close of seven years' end,
That voice is mixed with the swell of the storm,
And aye at the close of seven years' end,
A shapeless shadow that sleeps on the hill
Awakens and floats on the mist of the heath.
It is not the shade of a murdered man,
Who has rushed uncalled to the throne of his God,
And howls in the pause of the eddying storm.
This voice is low, cold, hollow, and chill,
'Tis not heard by the ear, but is felt in the soul.
'Tis more frightful far than the death-daemon's scream,
Or the laughter of fiends when they howl o'er the corpse
Of a man who has sold his soul to Hell.
It tells the approach of a mystic form,
A white courser bears the shadowy sprite;
More thin they are than the mists of the mountain,
When the clear moonlight sleeps on the waveless lake.
More pale HIS cheek than the snows of Nithona,
When winter rides on the northern blast,
And howls in the midst of the leafless wood.
Yet when the fierce swell of the tempest is raving,
And the whirlwinds howl in the caves of Inisfallen,
Still secure mid the wildest war of the sky,
The phantom courser scours the waste,
And his rider howls in the thunder's roar.
O'er him the fierce bolts of avenging Heaven
Pause, as in fear, to strike his head.
The meteors of midnight recoil from his figure,
Yet the 'wildered peasant, that oft passes by,
With wonder beholds the blue flash through his form:
And his voice, though faint as the sighs of the dead,
The startled passenger shudders to hear,
More distinct than the thunder's wildest roar.
Then does the dragon, who, chained in the caverns
To eternity, curses the champion of Erin,
Moan and yell loud at the lone hour of midnight,
And twine his vast wreaths round the forms of the daemons;
Then in agony roll his death-swimming eyeballs,
Though 'wildered by death, yet never to die!
Then he shakes from his skeleton folds the nightmares,
Who, shrieking in agony, seek the couch
Of some fevered wretch who courts sleep in vain;
Then the tombless ghosts of the guilty dead
In horror pause on the fitful gale.
They float on the swell of the eddying tempest,
And scared seek the caves of gigantic...
Where their thin forms pour unearthly sounds
On the blast that sweets the breast of the lake,
And mingles its swell with the moonlight air.
Cobwebs.
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

The spider as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified
By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian land.
Neglected son of genius,
I take thee by the hand.
The Spirit Of The Spring.
by Susanna Moodie

The spirit of the shower,
Of the sunshine and the breeze,
Of the dewy twilight hour,
Of the bud and opening flower,
My soul delighted sees.
Stern winter's robe of gray,
Beneath thy balmy sigh,
Like mist-wreaths melt away,
When the rosy laughing day
Lifts up his golden eye.--
Spirit of ethereal birth,
Thy azure banner floats,
In lucid folds, o'er air and earth,
And budding woods pour forth their mirth
In rapture-breathing notes.
I see upon the fleecy cloud
The spreading of thy wings;
The hills and vales rejoice aloud,
And Nature, starting from her shroud,
To meet her bridegroom springs.
Spirit of the rainbow zone,
Of the fresh and breezy morn,--
Spirit of climes where joy alone
For ever hovers round thy throne,
On wings of light upborne,
Eternal youth is in thy train
With rapture-beaming eyes,
And Beauty, with her magic chain,
And Hope, that laughs at present pain,
Points up to cloudless skies.
Spirit of love, of life, and light!
Each year we hail thy birth--
The day-star from the grave of night
That set to rise in skies more bright,--
To bless the sons of earth
With leaf--and bud--and perfumed flower,
Still deck the barren sod;
In thee we trace a higher power,
In thee we claim a brighter dower,
The day-spring of our God!--
At A Reading
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The spare Professor, grave and bald,
Began his paper. It was called,
I think, "A Brief Historic Glance
At Russia, Germany, and France."
A glance, but to my best belief
'Twas almost anything but brief--
A wide survey, in which the earth
Was seen before mankind had birth;
Strange monsters basked them in the sun,
Behemoth, armored glyptodon,
And in the dawn's unpractised ray
The transient dodo winged its way;
Then, by degrees, through silt and slough,
We reached Berlin--I don't know how.
The good Professor's monotone
Had turned me into senseless stone
Instanter, but that near me sat
Hypatia in her new spring hat,
Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom
Lighted the heavy-curtained room.
Hypatia--ah, what lovely things
Are fashioned out of eighteen springs!
At first, in sums of this amount,
The eighteen winters do not count.
Just as my eyes were growing dim
With heaviness, I saw that slim,
Erect, elastic figure there,
Like a pond-lily taking air.
She looked so fresh, so wise, so neat,
So altogether crisp and sweet,
I quite forgot what Bismarck said,
And why the Emperor shook his head,
And how it was Von Moltke's frown
Cost France another frontier town.
The only facts I took away
From the Professor's theme that day
Were these: a forehead broad and low,
Such as the antique sculptures show;
A chin to Greek perfection true;
Eyes of Astarte's tender blue;
A high complexion without fleck
Or flaw, and curls about her neck.
Arise, American!
by George Parsons Lathrop

The soul of a nation awaking, - 
High visions of daybreak I saw,
And the stir of a state, the forsaking
Of sin, and the worship of law.
O pine-tree, shout! And hoarser
Rush, river, unto the sea,
Foam-fettered and sun-flushed, a courser
That feels the prairie, free!
Our birth-star beckons to trial
All faith of the far-fled years,
Ere scorn was our share, and denial,
Or laughter for patriot's tears.
And lo, Faith comes forth the finer
From trampled thickets of fire,
And the orient opens diviner
Before her; the heaven lifts higher.
O deep, sweet eyes, and severer
Than steel! he knoweth who comes,
Thy hero: bend thine eyes nearer!
Now wilder than battle-drums
Thy glance in his blood is stirring!
His heart is alive like the main
When the roweled winds are spurring,
And the broad tides shoreward strain.
O hero, art thou among us?
O helper, hidest thou still?
Why hath he no anthem sung us,
Why waiteth, nor worketh our will?
For still a smirk or a favor
Can hide the face of the false;
And the old-time Faith seeks braver
Upholders, and sacreder walls.
Yea, cunning is Christian evil,
And subtle the conscience' snare;
But virtue's volcanic upheaval
Shall cast fine device to the air!
Too long has the land's soul slumbered,
And triumph bred dangerous ease, - 
Our victories all unnumbered,
Our feet on the down-bowed seas.
Come, then, simple and stalwart
Life of the earlier days!
Come! Far better than all were it - 
Our precepts, our prayers, and our lays - 
That the heart of the people should tremble
Accord to some mighty one's voice,
The helpless atoms assemble
In music, their valor to poise.
Come to us, mountain-dweller,
Leader, wherever thou art,
Skilled from thy cradle, a queller
Of serpents, and sound to the heart!
Modest, and mighty, and tender,
Man of an iron mold,
Learned or unlearned, our defender,
American-souled!
The Valley's Singing Day
by Robert Lee Frost

The sound of the closing outside door was all.
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,
As far as you went from the door, which was not far;
But had awakened under the morning star
The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.
He could have slept but a moment more at best.
Already determined dawn began to lay
In place across a cloud the slender ray
For prying across a cloud the slender ray
For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,
And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.
But dawn was not to begin their 'pearly-pearly;
(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,
Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),
Neither was song that day to be self-begun.
You had begun it, and if there needed proof,
I was asleep still under the dripping roof,
My window curtain hung over the sill to wet;
But I should awake to confirm your story yet;
I should be willing to say and help you say
That once you had opened the valley's singing day.
The Fountain Of Love
by Madison Julius Cawein

The source of laughter lies so near to tears,
And pain to rapture, that one fountain flows
From forth the two Love's; in whose deeps appears
The image of the Heaven each man knows.
The Five Students
by Thomas Hardy

The sparrow dips in his wheel-rut bath,
The sun grows passionate-eyed,
And boils the dew to smoke by the paddock-path;
As strenuously we stride, -
Five of us; dark He, fair He, dark She, fair She, I,
All beating by.
The air is shaken, the high-road hot,
Shadowless swoons the day,
The greens are sobered and cattle at rest; but not
We on our urgent way, -
Four of us; fair She, dark She, fair He, I, are there,
But one - elsewhere.
Autumn moulds the hard fruit mellow,
And forward still we press
Through moors, briar-meshed plantations, clay-pits yellow,
As in the spring hours - yes,
Three of us: fair He, fair She, I, as heretofore,
But - fallen one more.
The leaf drops: earthworms draw it in
At night-time noiselessly,
The fingers of birch and beech are skeleton-thin,
And yet on the beat are we, -
Two of us; fair She, I. But no more left to go
The track we know.
Icicles tag the church-aisle leads,
The flag-rope gibbers hoarse,
The home-bound foot-folk wrap their snow-flaked heads,
Yet I still stalk the course, -
One of us . . . Dark and fair He, dark and fair She, gone:
The rest - anon.
The Spacious Firmament On High
by Joseph Addison

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame
Their great Original proclaim.
Th'unwearied sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator's powers display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty Hand.
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
While all the stars that round her burn
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
Amid the radiant orbs be found?
In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'
Sonnets Of Old Egypt
by John Le Gay Brereton

I
The Sphinx
The spires of sand spring up at every gust
That bids them dance and scatter and lays them low:
He sits impassive, as the ages flow
And bear superbly the mirage of lust.
The moonbright steel he has witnessed redden and rust,
He has seen storm-proud deep-rooted empires grow,
And watched victorious gods flash forth and go;
And still before him spins the aspiring dust.
What has he seen in that hoar-centuried land
More strange and dreadful in its long delight
Of vain hope-haunted ever-starting quest
Than I can follow across this burning sand
Wherefrom the dizzying phantoms take their flight
Within the compass of a wanderer's breast?
II
Nicholson Museum: Exhibit 32
The curious look and pass, beholding naught
But yellow skin and small contorted toes:
I see a burning wilderness of woes
And stagger through its quivering air distraught.
I know the paradise a baby wrought
Of old where still the dear blue river flows,
And there's a crouching fear within that knows
To what a desperate havoc it was brought.
Dear Isis, have you not heard Horus sing
His infant ditties, kissed his radiant head,
And laughed at legs that learned to leap and run?
Forget it not. My heart in offering
Lies bare before you; take it, Queen, and spread
Thy sheltering wings about my little son.
III
Nefert
The gaudy pageant of the ages hies
Down the dim years, yet many a look is cast
That calls us dumbly, from the abysmal past,
In love that lives amid a world that dies.
I thrill to look on Nefert's friendly eyes,
Mad to recall the night I saw her last,
And yet across that memory has the blast
Whirled the deep desert sand of centuries.
Forgive if I forget thee now, my sweet,
If other eyes have led me to the source
Wherefrom the thirsting heart draws sustenance.
Can pallid marble feel my pulses beat?
We approach the limit of our dusty course
When hearts must live on store of old romance.
IV
Shu
Spread on the desert, Seb of mighty thew
Felt cloudy hair, trailed by the evening breeze,
Tingling along each nerve, as by degrees
Nut bowed above him, till his brown arms drew
Her body upon his; so, all night through,
The desert bloomed in starry ecstasies,
Till, even as she sighed in overburdened ease,
Between them thrust the radiant arm of Shu.
Yet they are of the gods, and evermore
Their joy renews itself when earth and sky
Are all one substance in the odorous gloom.
But when two lovers drain their little store
Of mortal bliss and yet are thirsting, why
Inflict on us thy peremptory doom?
V
Khonsu
'Have I not smiled and kept the world at bay,
Given my friends the joy that dried my tears
And left a savour of salt, and filled the years
With desolate wreckage of each yesterday?
O Khonsu,' with uplifted hands I pray,
'O Master of Love, give respite to my fears;
Before the dust is in my eyes and ears,
Grant me thy light upon the darkening way.'
He gazes mildly from the crescent moon;
The sea grows silent and its shimmering space
Is wave upon wave of sand beyond all sight;
I stretch my arms to take whate'er the boon,
And feel imagined kisses on my face,
Lonely amid the desert of the night.
The Spirit of freedom is Born of the Mountains.
by Alfred Castner King

The spirit of freedom is born of the mountains,
In gorge and in ca'on it hovers and dwells;
Pervading the torrents and crystalline fountains,
Which dash through the valleys and forest clad dells.
The spirit of freedom, so firm and impliant,
Is borne on the breeze, whose invisible waves
Descend from the mountain peaks, stern and defiant--
Created for freemen, but never for slaves.
The Songs That Mother Used To Sing.
by Freeman Edwin Miller

The songs that mother used to sing!
How tenderly those ditties roll,
And to the dirges in my soul
The happy notes of gladness bring!
Where'er my vagrant feet may roam
From pleasures of my childhood's home,
This life of mine with rapture throngs,
When thinking of my mother's songs.
They were not made of magic lays;
No perfect melodies were found,
That with the strains of fairy sound
Would charm the stranger's ear to praise;
But I can never hope to meet
Another music half so sweet,
And all my longing love will cling
To songs that mother used to sing.
With gentleness of crooning cries,
She freed the aching limbs from pain,
And lulled the eyes to sleep again
With sweetness of her lullabies.
Love mingled with her tender voice
In tones that made the heart rejoice,
And Heaven's music seemed to ring
In songs that mother used to sing.
Though years have passed, they still impart
Glad warbles to the hours of woe,
And their mute carols fondly throw
The sacred raptures o'er my heart;
Until my locks are thin and gray
Deep in my soul will sound alway,
And full of joy will ever spring
The songs that mother used to sing.