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Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls :

And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,

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And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells,
And he dances, and he yells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells,
Of the bells:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,

As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,

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To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

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HENRY TIMROD

THE COTTON BOLL

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,

Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands,
And slowly, thread by thread,

Draw forth the folded strands,

Than which the trembling line,

By whose frail help yon startled spider fled Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed,

Is scarce more fine;

And as the tangled skein

Unravels in my hands,

Betwixt me and the noonday light,

A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles

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The landscape broadens on my sight,

As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell
Like that which, in the ocean shell,

With mystic sound,

Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round,

And turns some city lane

Into the restless main,

With all his capes and isles!

Yonder bird,

Which floats, as if at rest,

In those blue tracts above the thunder, where
No vapors cloud the stainless air,

And never sound is heard,
Unless at such rare time

When, from the City of the Blest,
Rings down some golden chime,
Sees not from his high place

So vast a cirque of summer space

As widens round me in one mighty field,
Which, rimmed by seas and sands,

Doth hail its earliest daylight in the beams
Of gray Atlantic dawns;

And, broad as realms made up of many lands,
Is lost afar

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Behind the crimsom hills and purple lawns

Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams
Against the Evening Star!

And lo!

To the remotest point of sight,

Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,

The endless field is white;

And the whole landscape glows,

For many a shining league away,
With such accumulated light

As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!
Nor lack there (for the vision grows,

And the small charm within my hands-
More potent even than the fabled one,
Which oped whatever golden mystery
Lay hid in fairy wood or magic vale,
The curious ointment of the Arabian tale
Beyond all mortal sense

Doth stretch my sight's horizon, and I see,
Beneath its simple influence,

As if with Uriel's crown,

I stood in some great temple of the Sun,
And looked, as Uriel, down!)

Nor lack there pastures rich and fields all green

With all the common gifts of God,

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