Classic Poem

When winds grieve in the willow
And fireflies flit about;
When the owl forsakes her pillow
In the dead tree and wings out,
To hoot, hoot, and halloo
At the watch dog in his kennel;
When the beetle beats at the window,
And frogs croak in the fennel,—
I become a child once more,
Forgetting the years between,
And ancient cares drop from me,
Grey ghosts of grief I have seen.
And instead comes mystery to me,
As in the long-agoes:
And I only lie and listen—
And know what a child knows:

Know what a child foresenses
Of life and death and God,
When his young heart commences
To gaze, first, from the sod
At moon and star and planet
In the dark deeps above him,
In the night that seems too silent
And aloof from him to love him;
That seems so vast and vaulted
And eternal to his soul,
That a trembling prayer slips from him—
A first immortal toll
The Infinite takes from him.
To ease his unborn pain.
When winds grieve in the willow
I am that child again.