Midnights of revel,
And noondays of song! 
Is it so wrong? 
Go to the Devil!

I tell you that we,
While you are smirking
And lying and shirking
life’s duty of duties,
Honest sincerity,
We are in verity
Free! 
Free to rejoice
In blisses and beauties! 
Free as the voice
Of the wind as it passes! 
Free as the bird
In the weft of the grasses! 
Free as the word
Of the sun to the sea—­
Free!

A WAIF.

Do you know what it is to be vagrant born? 
A waif is only a waif.  And so,
For another idle hour I sit,
In large content while the fire burns low.

I gossip here to my crony heart
Of the day just over, and count it one
Of the royal elemental days,
Though its dreams were few and its deeds were none.

Outside, the winter; inside, the warmth
And a sweet oblivion of turmoil.  Why? 
All for a gentle girlish hand
With its warm and lingering good-bye.

THE JOYS OF THE ROAD.

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these: 
A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees;

A vagrant’s morning wide and blue,
In early fall when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,
Alluring up and enticing down

From rippled water to dappled swamp,
From purple glory to scarlet pomp;

The outward eye, the quiet will,
And the striding heart from hill to hill;

The tempter apple over the fence;
The cobweb bloom on the yellow quince;

The palish asters along the wood,—­
A lyric touch of the solitude;

An open hand, an easy shoe. 
And a hope to make the day go through,—­

Another to sleep with, and a third
To wake me up at the voice of a bird;

The resonant far-listening morn,
And the hoarse whisper of the corn;

The crickets mourning their comrades lost,
In the night’s retreat from the gathering frost;

(Or is it their slogan, plaintive and shrill,
As they beat on their corselets, valiant still?)

A hunger fit for the kings of the sea,
And a loaf of bread for Dickon and me;

A thirst like that of the Thirsty Sword,
And a jug of cider on the board;

An idle noon, a bubbling spring,
The sea in the pine-tops murmuring;

A scrap of gossip at the ferry;
A comrade neither glum nor merry,

Asking nothing, revealing naught,
But minting his words from a fund of thought,

A keeper of silence eloquent,
Needy, yet royally well content,

Of the mettled breed, yet abhorring strife,
And full of the mellow juice of life;

A taster of wine, with an eye for a maid,
Never too bold, and never afraid,

Never heart-whole, never heart-sick,
(These are the things I worship in Dick)