ALAS, that my heart is a lute,
Whereon you have learned to play!
For a many years it was mute,
Until one summer’s day
You took it, and touched it, and made it thrill,
And it thrills and throbs, and quivers still!
I had known you, dear, so long!
Yet my heart did not tell me why
It should burst one morn into song,...
“i Dreamed that we were lovers still,
As tender as we used to be
When I brought you the daffodil,
And you looked up and smiled at me.”
“True sweethearts were we then, indeed,
When youth was budding into bloom;
And now the flowers are gone to seed,
And breezes have left no perfume.”
“Because you ever, ever will...
I Know that deep within your heart of hearts
You hold me shrined apart from common things,
And that my step, my voice, can bring to you
A gladness that no other presence brings.
And yet, dear love, through all the weary days
You never speak one word of tenderness,
Nor stroke my hair, nor softly clasp my hand
Within your own in...
A Good wife rose from her bed one morn,
And thought, with a nervous dread,
Of the piles of clothes to be washed, and more
Than a dozen mouths to be fed.
“There ’s the meals to get for the men in the field,
And the children to fix away
To school, and the milk to be skimmed and churned;
And all to be done this day.”
It had...
From “The Seasons: Spring”
BUT happy they! the happiest of their kind!
Whom gentler stars unite, and in one fate
Their hearts, their fortunes, and their beings blend.
’T is not the coarser tie of human laws,
Unnatural oft, and foreign to the mind,
That binds their peace, but harmony itself,
Attuning all their passions into love;
...
Old Birch, who taught the village school,
Wedded a maid of homespun habit;
He was as stubborn as a mule,
And she as playful as a rabbit.
Poor Kate had scarce become a wife
Before her husband sought to make her
The pink of country polished life,
And prim and formal as a Quaker.
One day the tutor went abroad,
And...
A Matrimonial Epic
JOHN DOBBINS was so captivated
By Mary Trueman’s fortune, face, and cap,
(With near two thousand pounds the hook was baited,)
That in he popped to matrimony’s trap.
One small ingredient towards happiness,
It seems, ne’er occupied a single thought;
For his accomplished bride
Appearing well supplied...
An Epigram
MEN, dying, make their wills, but wives
Escape a work so sad;
Why should they make what all their lives
The gentle dames have had?
Your wedding-ring wears thin, dear wife; ah, summers not a few,
Since I put it on your finger first, have passed o’er me and you;
And, love, what changes we have seen,—what cares and pleasures, too,—
Since you became my own dear wife, when this old ring was new!
O, blessings on that happy day, the happiest of my life,
When, thanks to God, your low,...
Lines Written to His Wife, While on a Visit to Upper India
IF thou wert by my side, my love!
How fast would evening fail
In green Bengala’s palmy grove,
Listening the nightingale!
If thou, my love, wert by my side,
My babies at my knee,
How gayly would our pinnace glide
O’er Gunga’s mimic sea!
I miss thee at...
