Others may seem gay and certain, Steering one unbroken line. But lift up the heart’s dim curtai… It might prove as frail as mine. Full of shift and light vagary,

My life is governed by the clock, All duly mapped and plotted; And only with a nervous shock I miss the time allotted. My course without has always been

Who cares, Though age oppress, And griefs distress, And the long, long day Rolls slow away

I think about God. Yet I talk of small matters. Now isn’t it odd How my idle tongue chatters! Of quarrelsome neighbors,

An eye where love with laughter tw… And songs on kisses still insisten… Blended with graying hair and wrin… To you, my child, seem inconsisten… In fact, you think such conduct sh…

Imagination plays me most intolera… To enumerate them all would be unb… Just a trifle bids them gather and… And they tease me and torment me m… Tricks of strange, disordered acti…

I had visited her often, Long had sought, with vain endeavo… Her obdurate heart to soften; But she answered, ‘never, never.’ Then it softened and ran widely,

Hist! Zop! The world is all awry. Think that you can mend it? Take a turn and try. Virtue gets a fall or two,

You think my songs are strange. I think they are myself. I let my fancy range’€” The divagating elf. Don’t say my songs are common.

I’ve had a few diseases, And trifled with despair, Tried failure which displeases, And coquetted with care. But through the stormy weather

You really can’t imagine how I lo… I love the dancing language where… I love the songs of Homer, flowin… With a touch of human kindness in… I love the Alexandrians whose ini…

I might have been a worker, but I… I tell my idle stories in a philos… In a fuzzy, spiny mantle of remote… I lie and watch with half-shut eye… And they bustle and they rustle wi…

I like to read confessions As lengthy as Rousseau’s, With all their slow processions Of innumerable woes. I revel in Cellini,

You may think my life is quiet. I find it full of change, An ever-varied diet, As piquant as ’tis strange. Wild thoughts are always flying,

I’m sick to death of money, of the… And of practising perpetually smal… Of paring off a penny here, anothe… Of the planning and the worrying,… The savages went naked and no doub…