Works -- Part One: Life

Part One: Life 

This is my letter to the world

1. Success is counted sweetest
2. Our share of night to bear
3. Soul, wilt thou toss again?
4. ’T is so much joy!
5. Glee! the great storm is over!
6. If I can stop one heart from breaking
7. Within my reach!
8. A wounded deer leaps highest
9. The heart asks pleasure first
10. A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is
11. Much madness is divinest sense
12. I asked no other thing
13. The soul selects her own society
14. Some things that fly there be
15. I know some lonely houses off the road
16. To fight aloud is very brave
17. When night is almost done
18. Read, sweet, how others strove
19. Pain has an element of blank
20. I taste a liquor never brewed
21. He ate and drank the precious words
22. I had no time to hate, because
23. ’T was such a little, little boat
24. Whether my bark went down at sea
25. Belshazzar had a letter
26. The brain within its groove
27. I ’m nobody! Who are you?
28. I bring an unaccustomed wine
29. The nearest dream recedes, unrealized
30. We play at paste
31. I found the phrase to every thought
32. Hope is the thing with feathers
33. Dare you see a soul at the white heat?
34. Who never lost, are unprepared
35. I can wade grief
36. I never hear the word ‘escape’
37. For each ecstatic instant
38. Through the straight pass of suffering
39. I meant to have but modest needs
40. The thought beneath so slight a film
41. The soul unto itself
42. Surgeons must be very careful
43. I like to see it lap the miles
44. The show is not the show
45. Delight becomes pictorial
46. A thought went up my mind to-day
47. Is Heaven a physician?
48. Though I get home how late, how late!
49. A poor torn heart, a tattered heart
50. I should have been too glad, I see
51. It tossed and tossed
52. Victory comes late
53. God gave a loaf to every bird
54. Experiment to me
55. My country need not change her gown
56. Faith is a fine invention
57. Except the heaven had come so near
58. Portraits are to daily faces
59. I took my power in my hand
60. A shady friend for torrid days
61. Each life converges to some centre
62. Before I got my eye put out
63. Talk with prudence to a beggar
64. He preached upon ‘breadth’
65. Good night! which put the candle out?
66. When I hoped I feared
67. A deed knocks first at thought
68. Mine enemy is growing old
69. Remorse is memory awake
70. The body grows outside
71. Undue significance a starving man attaches
72. Heart not so heavy as mine
73. I many times thought peace had come
74. Unto my books so good to turn
75. This merit hath the worst
76. I had been hungry all the years
77. I gained it so
78. To learn the transport by the pain
79. I years had been from home
80. Prayer is the little implement
81. I know that he exists
82. Musicians wrestle everywhere
83. Just lost when I was saved!
84. ’T is little I could care for pearls
85. Superiority to fate
86. Hope is a subtle glutton
87. Forbidden fruit a flavor has
88. Heaven is what I cannot reach!
89. A word is dead
90. To venerate the simple days
91. It ’s such a little thing to weep
92. Drowning is not so pitiful
93. How still the bells in steeples stand
94. If the foolish call them ‘flowers’
95. Could mortal lip divine
96. My life closed twice before its close
97. We never know how high we are
98. While I was fearing it, it came
99. There is no frigate like a book
100. Who has not found the heaven below
101. A face devoid of love or grace
102. I had a guinea golden
103. From all the jails the boys and girls
104. Few get enough,—enough is one
105. Upon the gallows hung a wretch
106. I felt a cleavage in my mind
107. The reticent volcano keeps
108. If recollecting were forgetting
109. The farthest thunder that I heard
110. On the bleakness of my lot
111. A door just opened on a street
112. Are friends delight or pain?
113. Ashes denote that fire was
114. Fate slew him, but he did not drop
115. Finite to fail, but infinite to venture
116. I measure every grief I meet
117. I have a king who does not speak
118. It dropped so low in my regard
119. To lose one’s faith surpasses
120. I had a daily bliss
121. I worked for chaff, and earning wheat
122. Life, and Death, and Giants
123. Our lives are Swiss
124. Remembrance has a rear and front
125. To hang our head ostensibly
126. The brain is wider than the sky
127. The bone that has no marrow
128. The past is such a curious creature
129. To help our bleaker parts
130. What soft, cherubic creatures
131. Who never wanted,—maddest joy
132. It might be easier
133. You cannot put a fire out
134. A modest lot, a fame ‘petite’
135. Is bliss, then, such abyss
136. I stepped from plank to plank
137. One day is there of the series
138. Softened by Time’s consummate plush