By:
Edited by Heyman Wreford
Some have thought that in the dawning, in our being’s freshest glow,
God is nearer little children than their parents ever know,
And that if you listen sharply, better things than you can teach,
And a sort of mystic wisdom, trickle through their careless speech.
How it is I cannot answer; but I knew a little child,
Who among the thyme and clover and the bees was running wild —
And he came one summer evening, with his ringlets o’er his eyes,
And his hat was torn in pieces, chasing bees and butterflies.
“Now I’ll go to bed, dear mother, for I am very tired of play!”
And he said his “Now I lay me,” in a kind of careless way;
And he drank the cooling water from his little silver cup,
And said gaily, “When it’s morning, will the angels take me up?”
There he lies, how sweet and placid! and his breathing comes and goes
Like a zephyr moving softly, and his cheek is like a rose;
But his mother leaned to listen if his breathing could be heard, —
“Oh,” she murmured, “if the angels took my darling at his word!”
Night within its folding mantle hath the sleepers both beguiled,
And within its soft embracing’s rest the mother and the child;
Up she starteth from her dreaming, for a sound hath struck her ear —
And it comes from little Willie, lying on his trundle near.
Up she springeth, for it strikes upon her troubled ear again,
And his breath, in louder fetches, travels from his lungs in pain,
And his eyes are fixing upward on some face beyond the room,
And the blackness of the spoiler from his cheek hath chased the bloom.
Nevermore his “Now I lay me” will be said from mother’s knee,
Nevermore among the clover will he chase the humble bee;
Through the night she watched her darling, now despairing, now in hope,
And about the break of morning did the angels take him up.
SEL.