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,
Fair yellow daffodils stately and tall;
A sunshiny world full of laughter and leisure,
And fresh hearts unconscious of sorrow
and thrall,

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,
That you could never tell
If 't was a madman's voice
Or if the spirit of a bird
Within his heart did dwell:

you

heard,

A bird that dallies with his voice
Among the matted branches;

Or on the free blue air his note

To pierce, and fall, and rise, and float,
With bolder utterance launches,

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,
In truth, my eye and heart to fill
With the sweet sight which I saw there,
At the dwelling of the cottager.

A little in the doorway sitting,
The mother plied her busy knitting,
And her cheek so softly smiled,
You might be sure, although her gaze
Was on the meshes of the lace,
Yet her thoughts were with her child.
But when the boy had heard her voice,
As o'er her work she did rejoice,
His became silent altogether,
And slily creeping by the wall
He seiz❜d a single plume, let fall
By some wild bird of longest feather;
And all a-tremble with his freak,
He touch'd her lightly on the cheek.

Oh, what a loveliness her eyes
Gather in that one moment's space,
While peeping round the post she spies
Her darling's laughing face!
Oh, mother's love is glorifying,
On the cheek like sunset lying;
In the eyes a moisten'd light,
Softer than the moon at night!

Thomas Burbidge

THE WIDOW'S MITE

A WIDOW,- she had only one!
A puny and decrepit son;
But, day and night,

Though fretful oft, and weak and small,
A loving child, he was her all,

The Widow's Mite.

The Widow's Mite-aye, so sustain'd,
She battled onward, nor complain'd
Though friends were fewer:
And while she toil'd for daily fare,
A little crutch upon the stair

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,
A little crutch.

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,