A spider sewed at night    Without a light    Upon an arc of white.    If ruff it was of dame    Or shroud of gnome,    Himself, himself inform.    Of immortality    His strategy    Was physiognomy.

    It struck me every day    The lightning was as new    As if the cloud that instant slit    And let the fire through.     It burned me in the night,    It…

    The soul unto itself    Is an imperial friend, —    Or the most agonizing spy    An enemy could send.     Secure against its own,    No treason it can fear;    Itself its sovereign,…

    The soul should always stand ajar,    That if the heaven inquire,    He will not be obliged to wait,    Or shy of troubling her.     Depart, before the host has…

    It sifts from leaden sieves,    It powders all the wood,    It fills with alabaster wool    The wrinkles of the road.     It makes an even face    Of mountain and of…

    A narrow fellow in the grass    Occasionally rides;    You may have met him, — did you not,    His notice sudden is.     The grass divides as with a comb,    A…

    “Whose are the little beds,” I asked,    “Which in the valleys lie?”    Some shook their heads, and others smiled,    And no one made reply.     “Perhaps they did not…

    The show is not the show,    But they that go.    Menagerie to me    My neighbor be.    Fair play —    Both went to see.

    The body grows outside, —    The more convenient way, —    That if the spirit like to hide,    Its temple stands alway     Ajar, secure, inviting;    It never did betray    The soul…

    Some things that fly there be, —    Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:    Of these no elegy.     Some things that stay there be, —    Grief, hills, eternity:    Nor this behooveth me….