C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Child-Songs
By John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
S
And on our Saxon tongue
The echoes of the home-born hymns
The Aryan mothers sung.
In every age and clime;
The earliest cradles of the race
Were rocked to poet’s rhyme.
Nor green earth’s virgin sod,
So moved the singer’s heart of old
As these small ones of God.
Was more than dawning morn,
Than opening flower or crescent moon
The human soul new-born!
The heart of genius turns,
And more than all the sages teach
From lisping voices learns,—
Where Tweed and Teviot glide,
That sound to-day on all the winds
That blow from Rydal-side,—
And folk-lore of the Finn,
Where’er to holy Christmas hearths
The Christ Child enters in!
The heart in reverence kneels;
The wonder of the primal birth
The latest mother feels.
As only weakness can;
God hath his small interpreters:
The child must teach the man.
Our eyes of faith grow dim;
But he is freshest from His hands
And nearest unto Him!
For sin-sick hearts and cold,
The angels of our childhood still
The Father’s face behold.
O Master most divine,
To feel the deep significance
Of these wise words of thine!
What innocence beholds;
No cunning finds the key of heaven,
No strength its gate unfolds.
That gate shall open fall;
The mind of pride is nothingness,
The childlike heart is all!