Close on my heart was resting
A sunny golden head,
As the dim gray of the twilight
Crept round with noiseless tread.
"Tell me a 'tory, mamma,"
The blue-eyed baby said,
"About some itty birdie
In za itty birdie bed.
"'Bout fen oo was itty
An'ze mens was walkin' hay
An' found free ittie birdies
Wiz za muzzer don away."
"Some other time, my darling;
Mamma's tired now."
A shade of disappointment
Swept over the baby's brow.
The dear blue eyes grew misty;
O, lips that lived to blame,
That kissed and whispered "sometime"--
That "sometime" never came.
Again, the dim, gray twilight
Creeps round with noiseless tread,
But on my heart is resting
No sunny golden head.
No sweet voice pleads with mamma
"Tell me a 'tory" now,
And only death can take away
The shadow on my brow.
* * * * *
"IT IS LIFE TO DIE."
"It is life to die," the muse has sung,
The prophet words have rung from pole to pole,
The trust, the hope to which many have clung,
An echo woke in many a weary soul.
"Ah! welcome thrice if but that death would come
As sweeps the avalanche from Alpine hight,
As falls the flashing storm-sent lightning-bolt,
Resistless in its terror and its might.
"But oh! to die by slowest slow decay,
To clothe a dying heart in life's warm breath,
When every day repeats a long eternity,
And every hour is but another death!"
O, God! why were we born to live a life,
From very thought of which our souls must shrink,
To sink down in the waves of human strife,
And ever only wait, and wait, and think.
No wonder that so many hapless ones,
Too sensitive the specter to defy,
Arm, Hamlet-like, against a sea of woes,
And test the truth, that "it is life to die."
* * * * *