Classic Poem

Be pitiful, be pitiful,
Pity the weak and worn;
Pity the outcast vile,
Ever so lost and Iorn.
Pity the poor who groan beneath
Poverty's heavy load —
Treading with bleeding feet
Life's dark and thorny road.

We pity the heathen abroad —
Woe for heathen at home;
Cry of perishing souls
Into our ears has come.
Brothers' blood to frowning heaven
Is crying from the ground —
Ignorance, vice and crime
Still increase and abound.

Be pitiful, be pitiful
To children born in crime;
Spawn of the slums, poor waifs,
Cast on the stream of time
These little bodies, shrivell'd, vile,
Downtrodden in the mire,
Hold each a priceless gem,
A spark of living fire.

Like Him who came to seek and save
The lost, we would rescue;
Seek the lost gem, and light
The dying spark anew;
From the deep pit and miry clay
Where they embedded lie —
Reach down, and lift them up
Ere they shall sink and die.

Pitiful, oh, how pitiful,
To see our thousands sink;
Oh lost, how lost, o'erwhelmed
In foaming floods of drink!
The life-boat launch, and ply the oars
With strong and tireless hand;
Rescue, if not the whole,
Bring all you may to land.

We gaze through tears on ghastly forms
Cast by the stormy waves
On life's dark shores, immured
In timeless, nameless graves
O pitying Heaven, look down,
And bid the waves be still!
We toil too oft in vain,
Though working with a will.

I asked a learned sheriff, whence
Our crimes and evils flow —
Their causes and effects
You in your place must know.
" I've found, " he said, " the direful cause
Of such effects, and think,
Exceptions being few,
The cause is ever Drink. "