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Home  »  An American Anthology, 1787–1900  »  1651 England

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By Grace ElleryChanning-Stetson

1651 England

WHO comes to England not to learn

The love for her his fathers bore,

Breathing her air, can still return

No kindlier than he was before.

In vain, for him, from shore to shore

Those fathers strewed an alien strand

With the loved names that evermore

Are native to our ear and land.

Who sees the English elm-trees fling

Long shadows where his footsteps pass,

Or marks the crocuses that spring

Sets starlike in the English grass,

And sees not, as within a glass,

New England’s loved reflection rise,—

Mists darker and more dense, alas!

Than England’s fogs are in his eyes.

And who can walk by English streams,

Through sunny meadows gently led,

Nor feel, as one who lives in dreams,

The wound with which his fathers bled,—

The homesick tears which must, unshed,

Have dimmed the brave, unfaltering eyes

That saw New England’s elms outspread

Green branches to her loftier skies?

How dear to exiled hearts the sound

Of little brooks that run and sing!

How dear, in scanty garden ground,

The crocus calling back the spring

To English hearts remembering!

How dear that aching memory

Of cuckoo cry and lark’s light wing!

And for their sake how dear to me!

Who owns not how, so often tried,

The bond all trial hath withstood;

The leaping pulse, the racial pride

In more than common brotherhood;

Nor feels his kinship like a flood

Rise blotting every dissonant trace,—

He is not of the ancient blood!

He is not of the Island race!