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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=409112" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Cotton Boll</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">While I recline<br>At ease beneath<br>This immemorial pine,<br>Small sphere!<br>(By dusky fingers brought this morning here<br>And shown with boastful smiles),<br>I turn thy cloven sheath,<br>Through which the soft white fibres peer,<br>That, with their gossamer bands,<br>Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands,<br>And slowly, thread by thread,<br>Draw forth the folded strands,<br>Than which the trembling line,<br>By whose frail help yon startled spider fled<br>Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed,<br>Is scarce more fine;<br>And as the tangled skein<br>Unravels in my hands,<br>Betwixt me and the noonday light,<br>A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles<br>The landscape broadens on my sight,<br>As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell<br>Like that which, in the ocean shell,<br>With mystic sound,<br>Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round,<br>And turns some city lane<br>Into the restless main,<br>With all his capes and isles!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yonder bird,<br>Which floats, as if at rest,<br>In those blue tracts above the thunder, where<br>No vapors cloud the stainless air,<br>And never sound is heard,<br>Unless at such rare time<br>When, from the City of the Blest,<br>Rings down some golden chime,<br>Sees not from his high place<br>So vast a cirque of summer space<br>As widens round me in one mighty field,<br>Which, rimmed by seas and sands,<br>Doth hail its earliest daylight in the beams<br>Of gray Atlantic dawns;<br>And, broad as realms made up of many lands,<br>Is lost afar<br>Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns<br>Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams<br>Against the Evening Star!<br>And lo!<br>To the remotest point of sight,<br>Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,<br>The endless field is white;<br>And the whole landscape glows,<br>For many a shining league away,<br>With such accumulated light<br>As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!<br>Nor lack there (for the vision grows,<br>And the small charm within my hands -<br>More potent even than the fabled one,<br>Which oped whatever golden mystery<br>Lay hid in fairy wood or magic vale,<br>The curious ointment of the Arabian tale -<br>Beyond all mortal sense<br>Doth stretch my sight's horizon, and I see,<br>Beneath its simple influence,<br>As if with Uriel's crown,<br>I stood in some great temple of the Sun,<br>And looked, as Uriel, down!)<br>Nor lack there pastures rich and fields all green<br>With all the common gifts of God,<br>For temperate airs and torrid sheen<br>Weave Edens of the sod;<br>Through lands which look one sea of billowy gold<br>Broad rivers wind their devious ways;<br>A hundred isles in their embraces fold<br>A hundred luminous bays;<br>And through yon purple haze<br>Vast mountains lift their plumed peaks cloud-crowned;<br>And, save where up their sides the ploughman creeps,<br>An unhewn forest girds them grandly round,<br>In whose dark shades a future navy sleeps!<br>Ye Stars, which, though unseen, yet with me gaze<br>Upon this loveliest fragment of the earth!<br>Thou Sun, that kindlest all thy gentlest rays<br>Above it, as to light a favorite hearth!<br>Ye Clouds, that in your temples in the West<br>See nothing brighter than its humblest flowers!<br>And you, ye Winds, that on the ocean's breast<br>Are kissed to coolness ere ye reach its bowers!<br>Bear witness with me in my song of praise,<br>And tell the world that, since the world began,<br>No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays,<br>Or given a home to man!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But these are charms already widely blown!<br>His be the meed whose pencil's trace<br>Hath touched our very swamps with grace,<br>And round whose tuneful way<br>All Southern laurels bloom;<br>The Poet of 'The Woodlands', unto whom<br>Alike are known<br>The flute's low breathing and the trumpet's tone,<br>And the soft west wind's sighs;<br>But who shall utter all the debt,<br>O Land wherein all powers are met<br>That bind a people's heart,<br>The world doth owe thee at this day,<br>And which it never can repay,<br>Yet scarcely deigns to own!<br>Where sleeps the poet who shall fitly sing<br>The source wherefrom doth spring<br>That mighty commerce which, confined<br>To the mean channels of no selfish mart,<br>Goes out to every shore<br>Of this broad earth, and throngs the sea with ships<br>That bear no thunders; hushes hungry lips<br>In alien lands;<br>Joins with a delicate web remotest strands;<br>And gladdening rich and poor,<br>Doth gild Parisian domes,<br>Or feed the cottage-smoke of English homes,<br>And only bounds its blessings by mankind!<br>In offices like these, thy mission lies,<br>My Country! and it shall not end<br>As long as rain shall fall and Heaven bend<br>In blue above thee; though thy foes be hard<br>And cruel as their weapons, it shall guard<br>Thy hearth-stones as a bulwark; make thee great<br>In white and bloodless state;<br>And haply, as the years increase -<br>Still working through its humbler reach<br>With that large wisdom which the ages teach -<br>Revive the half-dead dream of universal peace!<br>As men who labor in that mine<br>Of Cornwall, hollowed out beneath the bed<br>Of ocean, when a storm rolls overhead,<br>Hear the dull booming of the world of brine<br>Above them, and a mighty muffled roar<br>Of winds and waters, yet toil calmly on,<br>And split the rock, and pile the massive ore,<br>Or carve a niche, or shape the arch|'ed roof;<br>So I, as calmly, weave my woof<br>Of song, chanting the days to come,<br>Unsilenced, though the quiet summer air<br>Stirs with the bruit of battles, and each dawn<br>Wakes from its starry silence to the hum<br>Of many gathering armies. Still,<br>In that we sometimes hear,<br>Upon the Northern winds, the voice of woe<br>Not wholly drowned in triumph, though I know<br>The end must crown us, and a few brief years<br>Dry all our tears,<br>I may not sing too gladly. To Thy will<br>Resigned, O Lord! we cannot all forget<br>That there is much even Victory must regret.<br>And, therefore, not too long<br>From the great burthen of our country's wrong<br>Delay our just release!<br>And, if it may be, save<br>These sacred fields of peace<br>From stain of patriot or of hostile blood!<br>Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood<br>Back on its course, and, while our banners wing<br>Northward, strike with us! till the Goth shall cling<br>To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave<br>Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate<br>The lenient future of his fate<br>There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays<br>Shall one day mark the Port which ruled the Western seas.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Henry+Timrod">Henry Timrod</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=409112" data-title="The Cotton Boll de Henry Timrod" data-description="While I recline
At ease beneath
This immemorial pine,
Small sphere!
(By dusky fingers brought this morning here
And shown with boastful smiles),
I turn thy cloven sheath,
Through which the soft white fibres peer,
That, with their gossamer bands,
U..."></div>
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