This book is all that ’s left me now!
Tears will unbidden start,—
With faltering lip and throbbing brow
I press it to my heart.
For many generations past,
Here is our family tree;
My mother’s hands this Bible clasped,
She, dying, gave it me.
Ah! well do I remember those
Whose names these records bear;
...
Little, i ween, did Mary guess,
As on her arm her baby lay,
What tides of joy would swell and beat,
Through ages long, on Christmas day.
And what if she had known it all,—
The awful splendor of his fame?
The inmost heart of all her joy
Would still, methinks, have been the same:
The joy that every mother knows...
Jack and JILL
AH, Jack it was, and with him little Jill,
Of the same age and size, a neighbor’s daughter,
Who on a breezy morning climbed the hill
To fetch down to the house a pail of water.
Jack put his best foot foremost on that day,—
Vaulting ambition we have seen before,—
He stepped too far, of course, and soon he lay
In the...
I
there was a rover from a western shore,
England! whose eyes the sudden tears did drown,
Beholding the white cliff and sunny down
Of thy good realm, beyond the sea’s uproar.
I, for a moment, dreamed that, long before,
I had beheld them thus, when, with the frown
Of sovereignty, the victor’s palm and crown
Thou from the tilting-...
She was so little—little in her grave,
The wide earth all around so hard and cold—
She was so little! therefore did I crave
My arms might still her tender form enfold.
She was so little, and her cry so weak
When she among the heavenly children came—
She was so little—I alone might speak
For her who knew no word nor her own name....
All day and all day, as I sit at my measureless turning,
They come and they go,—
The little ones down on the rocks,—and the sunlight is burning
On vineyards below;
All day and all day, as I sit at my stone and am ceaselessly grinding,
The almond boughs blow.
When she was here—O my first-born!—here, grinding and singing,
...
The Cold winds swept the mountain’s height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snow she pressed,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.
And colder still the winds did blow,
And darker hours of night came on,
And deeper grew the...
The Wind blew wide the casement, and within—
It was the loveliest picture!—a sweet child
Lay in its mother’s arms, and drew its life,
In pauses, from the fountain,—the white round
Part shaded by loose tresses, soft and dark,
Concealing, but still showing, the fair realm
Of so much rapture, as green shadowing trees
With beauty shroud the...
Is there, when the winds are singing
In the happy summer-time,—
When the raptured air is ringing
With Earth’s music heavenward springing,
Forest chirp, and village chime,—
Is there, of the sounds that float
Unsighingly, a single note
Half so sweet and clear and wild
As the laughter of a child?
Listen! and be now...
Out of Norfolk, the Gift of My Cousin, Ann Bodham
O THAT those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine,—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
“Grieve not, my child; chase all thy fears away!”
The meek...
