Poem of Sentiment and Reflection

             The Crowded Street

Let me move slowly through the street,
       Filled with an ever-shifting train,
Amid the sound of step that beat
       The murmuring walks like auntum rain.

How fast the flitting figures come !
       The mild, the fierce, the stony face,-
Some bright with thoughless smilesm and some
       Where the secret tears have leaf their trace.

They pass - to toil, to strife, to rest ;
       To halls in which the feast is spread ;
To chambers where the funeral guest
       In silence sits beside the dead.

And some to happy homes reapir,
      Where childern, pressing cheek to cheek,
With mute careless shall declare
       The tenderness they cannot speak.

And some, who walk in calmness here,
       Shall shudder as they reach the door
Where one who made their dwelling dear,
       Its flower, its light, is seen no more.

Youth, with pale cheek and slender frame,
      And dream of greaness in thine eye !
Go'st thou to build an early name,
      Or early  in the task to die ?

Keen son of trade, with eager brow !
     Who is now fluttering in thy snare ?
Thy golden fortunes, tower they now,
     Or melt the glittering spires in air ?

Who of this crowd to-night shall tread
     The dance till daylight gleam again ?
Who sorrow o'er the untimely dead ?
     Who writhe in throes of mortal pain ?

Some, famine-struck, shall think how long
      The cold, dark hour, how slow the light ;
And some, who flaunt amid the throng,
       Shall hide in dens of shame to-night.

Each where his tasks or pleasures call,
      They pass, and heed each other not.
There is who heeds, who holds them all
       In his large love and boundless thought.

These strunggling tides of life, that seem
       In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
       That rolls to its appoitnted end.

                                      -William Cullen Bryant-