Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Religious Poems

Child-Songs

STILL linger in our noon of time

And on our Saxon tongue

The echoes of the home-born hymns

The Aryan mothers sung.

And childhood had its litanies

In every age and clime;

The earliest cradles of the race

Were rocked to poet’s rhyme.

Nor sky, nor wave, nor tree, nor flower,

Nor green earth’s virgin sod,

So moved the singer’s heart of old

As these small ones of God.

The mystery of unfolding life

Was more than dawning morn,

Than opening flower or crescent moon

The human soul new-born!

And still to childhood’s sweet appeal

The heart of genius turns,

And more than all the sages teach

From lisping voices learns,—

The voices loved of him who sang,

Where Tweed and Teviot glide,

That sound to-day on all the winds

That blow from Rydal-side,—

Heard in the Teuton’s household songs,

And folk-lore of the Finn,

Where’er to holy Christmas hearths

The Christ-child enters in!

Before life’s sweetest mystery still

The heart in reverence kneels;

The wonder of the primal birth

The latest mother feels.

We need love’s tender lessons taught

As only weakness can;

God hath His small interpreters;

The child must teach the man.

We wander wide through evil years,

Our eyes of faith grow dim;

But he is freshest from His hands

And nearest unto Him!

And haply, pleading long with Him

For sin-sick hearts and cold,

The angels of our childhood still

The Father’s face behold.

Of such the kingdom!—Teach Thou us,

O Master most divine,

To feel the deep significance

Of these wise words of Thine!

The haughty eye shall seek in vain

What innocence beholds;

No cunning finds the key of heaven,

No strength its gate unfolds.

Alone to guilelessness and love

That gate shall open fall;

The mind of pride is nothingness,

The childlike heart is all!

1875.