| |
| MY mother’s voice! how often creeps | |
| Its cadence on my lonely hours! | |
| Like healing sent on wings of sleep, | |
| Or dew to the unconscious flowers. | |
| I can forget her melting prayer | 5 |
| While leaping pulses madly fly, | |
| But in the still unbroken air | |
| Her gentle tone comes stealing by, | |
| And years, and sin, and manhood flee, | |
| And leave me at my mother’s knee. | 10 |
| The book of nature, and the print | |
| Of beauty on the whispering sea, | |
| Give aye to me some lineament | |
| Of what I have been taught to be. | |
| My heart is harder, and perhaps | 15 |
| My manliness hath drunk up tears, | |
| And there ’s a mildew in the lapse | |
| Of a few miserable years— | |
| But nature’s book is even yet | |
| With all my mother’s lessons writ. | 20 |
| I have been out at eventide | |
| Beneath a moonlight sky of spring, | |
| When earth was garnish’d like a bride, | |
| And night had on her silver wing— | |
| When bursting leaves and diamond grass, | 25 |
| And waters leaping to the light, | |
| And all that makes the pulses pass | |
| With wilder fleetness, throng’d the night— | |
| When all was beauty—then have I | |
| With friends on whom my love is flung | 30 |
| Like myrrh on winds of Araby, | |
| Gazed up where evening’s lamp is hung. | |
| And when the beautiful spirit there, | |
| Flung over me its golden chain, | |
| My mother’s voice came on the air | 35 |
| Like the light dropping of the rain— | |
| And resting on some silver star | |
| The spirit of a bended knee, | |
| I’ ve pour’d her low and fervent prayer | |
| That our eternity might be | 40 |
| To rise in heaven like stars at night! | |
| And tread a living path of light | |
| I have been on the dewy hills, | |
| When night was stealing from the dawn, | |
| And mist was on the waking rills, | 45 |
| And tints were delicately drawn | |
| In the gray East—when birds were waking | |
| With a low murmur in the trees, | |
| And melody by fits was breaking | |
| Upon the whisper of the breeze, | 50 |
| And this when I was forth, perchance | |
| As a worn reveller from the dance— | |
| And when the sun sprang gloriously | |
| And freely up, and hill and river | |
| Were catching upon wave and tree | 55 |
| The arrows from his subtle quiver— | |
| I say a voice has thrill’d me then, | |
| Heard on the still and rushing light, | |
| Or, creeping from the silent glen | |
| Like words from the departing night— | 60 |
| Hath stricken me, and I have press’d | |
| On the wet grass my fever’d brow, | |
| And pouring forth the earliest | |
| First prayer, with which I learn’d to bow, | |
| Have felt my mother’s spirit rush | 65 |
| Upon me as in by-past years, | |
| And yielding to the blessed gush | |
| Of my ungovernable tears, | |
| Have risen up—the gay, the wild— | |
| As humble as a very child. | 70 |
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