SEVEN TIMES FOUR HEIGH HO! daisies and buttercups, Fair yellow daffodils, stately and tall, When the wind wakes how they rock in the grasses, And dance with the cuckoo-buds, slender and small: Here's two bonny boys, and here's mother's own lasses, Eager to gather them all. Heigh ho! daisies and buttercups, Mother shall thread them a daisy chain; Sing them a song of the pretty hedge-spar row, That loved her brown little ones, loved them full fain; Sing, "Heart thou art wide though the house Heigh ho! daisies and buttercups, Sweet wagging cowslips, they bend and they bow; A ship sails afar over warm ocean waters, And haply one musing doth stand at her prow. O bonny brown sons, and O sweet little daughters, Maybe he thinks on you now! Heigh ho! daisies and buttercups, Send down on their pleasure smiles passing its measure God that is over us all. Jean Ingelow A MOTHER'S PICTURE SHE seemed an angel to our infant eyes! Once, when the glorifying moon revealed Her who at evening by our pillow kneeled — Soft-voiced and golden-haired, from holy skies Flown to her loves on wings of ParadiseWe looked to see the pinions half-concealed. The Tuscan vines and olives will not yield Her back to me, who loved her in this wise, And since have little known her, but have grown To see another mother, tenderly, Watch over sleeping darlings of her own; Perchance the years have changed her: yet alone This picture lingers: still she seems to me The fair, young Angel of my infancy. Edmund Clarence Stedman MOTHER'S LOVE He sang so wildly, did the Boy, you heard, A bird that dallies with his voice Or on the free blue air his note To pierce, and fall, and rise, and float, None ever was so sweet as he, The boy that wildly sang to me; Though toilsome was the way and long, He led me not to lose the song. But when again we stood below The unhidden sky, his feet Grew slacker, and his note more slow, But more than doubly sweet. He led me then a little way Athwart the barren moor, And then he stayed and bade me stay Beside a cottage door; I could have stayed of mine own will, A little in the doorway sitting, Oh, what a loveliness her eyes Thomas Burbidge THE WIDOW'S MITE A WIDOW,- she had only one! Though fretful oft, and weak and small, The Widow's Mite. The Widow's Mite-aye, so sustain'd, Was music to her. I saw her then, and now I see That, though resign'd and cheerful, she Has sorrow'd much: She has, -He gave it tenderly, Much faith, and, carefully laid by, Frederick Locker-Lampson THE DAGUERREOTYPE THIS, then, is she, My mother as she looked at seventeen, When she first met my father. Young in credibly, |