English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
784. Children
C
For I hear you at your play,
And the questions that perplexed me
Have vanished quite away.
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows
And the brooks of morning run.
In your thoughts the brooklet’s flow,
But in mine is the wind of Autumn
And the first fall of the snow.
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.
With light and air for food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
Have been hardened into wood,—
Through them it feels the glow
Of a brighter and sunnier climate
Than reaches the trunks below.
And whisper in my ear
What the birds and the winds are singing
In your sunny atmosphere.
And the wisdom of our books,
When compared with your caresses,
And the gladness of your looks?
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.