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| WHO comes to England not to learn | |
| The love for her his fathers bore, | |
| Breathing her air, can still return | |
| No kindlier than he was before. | |
| In vain, for him, from shore to shore | 5 |
| Those fathers strewed an alien strand | |
| With the loved names that evermore | |
| Are native to our ear and land. | |
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| Who sees the English elm-trees fling | |
| Long shadows where his footsteps pass, | 10 |
| Or marks the crocuses that spring | |
| Sets starlike in the English grass, | |
| And sees not, as within a glass, | |
| New England’s loved reflection rise,— | |
| Mists darker and more dense, alas! | 15 |
| Than England’s fogs are in his eyes. | |
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| And who can walk by English streams, | |
| Through sunny meadows gently led, | |
| Nor feel, as one who lives in dreams, | |
| The wound with which his fathers bled,— | 20 |
| The homesick tears which must, unshed, | |
| Have dimmed the brave, unfaltering eyes | |
| That saw New England’s elms outspread | |
| Green branches to her loftier skies? | |
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| How dear to exiled hearts the sound | 25 |
| Of little brooks that run and sing! | |
| How dear, in scanty garden ground, | |
| The crocus calling back the spring | |
| To English hearts remembering! | |
| How dear that aching memory | 30 |
| Of cuckoo cry and lark’s light wing! | |
| And for their sake how dear to me! | |
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| Who owns not how, so often tried, | |
| The bond all trial hath withstood; | |
| The leaping pulse, the racial pride | 35 |
| In more than common brotherhood; | |
| Nor feels his kinship like a flood | |
| Rise blotting every dissonant trace,— | |
| He is not of the ancient blood! | |
| He is not of the Island race! | 40 |
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