There! little girl, don’t cry!
They have broken your doll, I know;
And your tea-set blue,
And your play-house, too,
Are things of the long ago;
But childish troubles will soon pass by.—
There! little girl, don’t cry!
There! little girl, don’t cry!
They have broken your slate, I know;...
You needn’t be trying to comfort me—I tell you my dolly is dead!
There ’s no use in saying she isn’t, with a crack like that in her head.
It ’s just like you said it wouldn’t hurt much to have my tooth out, that day;
And then, when the man ’most pulled my head off, you hadn’t a word to say.
And I guess you must think I ’m a baby, when you say you can mend it...
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?
You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtles off their legs.
Such a life is very fine,
But it ’s not so nice as mine:
You must often, as...
When children are playing alone on the green,
In comes the playmate that never was seen.
When children are happy and lonely and good,
The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.
Nobody heard him and nobody saw,
His is a picture you never could draw,
But he ’s sure to be present, abroad or at home,
When children are happy and...
All up and down in shadow-town
The shadow children go;
In every street you ’re sure to meet
Them running to and fro.
They move around without a sound,
They play at hide-and-seek,
But no one yet that I have met
Has ever heard them speak.
Beneath the tree you often see
Them dancing in and out,
And in...
From Machaon and the Faun
I DANCE and dance! Another faun,
A black one, dances on the lawn.
He moves with me, and when I lift
My heels his feet directly shift:
I can’t outdance him though I try;
He dances nimbler than I.
I toss my head, and so does he;
What tricks he dares to play on me!
I touch the ivy in my hair;
...
I Have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see,
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he...
Piped the Blackbird, on the beechwood spray,
“Pretty maid, slow wandering this way,
What ’s your name?” quoth he,—
“What ’s your name? O, stop and straight unfold,
Pretty maid with showery curls of gold.”—
“Little Bell,” said she.
Little Bell sat down beneath the rocks,
Tossed aside her gleaming golden locks,—
“Bonny...
The Sunset light is on the sail,
The water all aglow,
And on the billows up and down
The boat rocks to and fro;
The birds float upward to the sky—
Oh, how I long for wings to fly!
The boat has wings, the birds have wings,
But none remain for me
Save wings of kind and loving thought
And wings of memory.
On...
Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.
I saw the next-door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant faces more
That I had never seen before.
I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky’s blue looking-...
