#Americans
Where West Point crouches, and wi… Turns the whole river eastward thr… Whose jutting crags, half silver,… Like bossy bucklers of Leonidas; Where buttressed low against the s…
Bunny, lying in the grass, Saw the shining column pass; Saw the starry banner fly, Saw the chargers fret and fume, Saw the flapping hat and plume,—
(NEW JERSEY, 1780) Here’s the spot. Look around you.… Lay the Hessians encamped. By tha… Stood the gaunt Jersey farmers. A… You may dig anywhere and you’ll tu…
(OPENING OF THE CALI… Brief words, when actions wait, ar… The prompter’s hand is on his bell… The coming heroes, lovers, kings, Are idly lounging at the wings;
Behind the footlights hangs the ru… A trifle shabby in the upturned bl… Of flaring gas and curious eyes th… The stage, methinks, perhaps is no… And hardly fit for royal Richard’…
(MUD FLAT, 1860) So you’re back from your travels,… And you left but a twelvemonth ago… You’ve hobnobbed with Louis Napol… Eugenie, and kissed the Pope’s to…
(REPORTED BY TRUTHFUL J… Waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids… And drop them books and first pot-… I kin not sling a fairy tale of J… For I hold it is unchristian to d…
Sauntering hither on listless wing… Careless vagabond of the sea, Little thou heedest the surf that… The bar that thunders, the shale t… Give me to keep thy company.
Came the relief. ‘What, sentry, h… How passed the night through thy l… ‘Cold, cheerless, dark,—as may bef… The hour before the dawn is breaki… ‘No sight? no sound?’ ‘No; nothin…
(ALKALI STATION) Cicely says you’re a poet; maybe,—… I reckon you’d give me a hundred,… Poetry!—that’s the way some chaps… But I takes mine ‘straight withou…
Of all the fountains that poets si… Crystal, thermal, or mineral sprin… Ponce de Leon’s Fount of Youth, Wells with bottoms of doubtful tru… In short, of all the springs of T…
Our window’s not much, though it f… There’s a fly in the pane that get… But it’s curious how people think… For ME to look out of the window! Why, when company comes, and they’…
(OPENING OF THE PACIF… What was it the Engines said, Pilots touching,—head to head Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back?
Name of my heroine, simply ‘Rose;… Surname, tolerable only in prose; Habitat, Paris,—that is where She resided for change of air; Aetat twenty; complexion fair;
Why, as to that, said the engineer… Ghosts ain’t things we are apt to… Spirits don’t fool with levers muc… And throttle-valves don’t take to… And as for Jim,