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BEAUTY EVERYWHERE

LET me go where'er I will,
I hear a sky-born music still.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

In vain we look, in vain uplift
Our eyes to heaven if we are blind.
We see but what we have the gift
Of seeing. What we bring we find.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare,

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance?

WILLIAM H. DAVIES

I'M GLAD

I'm glad the sky is painted blue,
And the earth is painted green,
With such a lot of nice fresh air

All sandwiched in between.

ANONYMOUS

(From The Humbler Poets, edited by Wallace and Frances Rice, A. C. McClurg and Company)

TO THINK

To think I once saw grocery shops

With but a casual eye,

And fingered figs and apricots

As one who came to buy.

To think I never dreamed of how

Bananas sway in rain,

And often looked at oranges

But never thought of Spain.

And in those wasted days I saw

No sails above the tea,

For grocery shops were grocery shops

Not hemispheres to me.

ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH

IN THE CITY

SUDDEN amid the slush and rain,
I know not how, I know not why,
A rose unfolds within my brain,
And all the world is at July.

A trumpet sounds, green surges splash,
And daffodillies dance i' the sun;
Through tears fair pictures flit and flash
Upon the City's background dun.

Women are true and men are good,
Concord sleeps at the heart of strife.
How sweet is human brotherhood,
And all the common daily life!

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

MENDING WALL

SOMETHING there is that does n't love a wall;
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Is n't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I 'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that does n't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness, as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
ROBERT FROST