118 ONE THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS
Hail and Farewell
At G breakfast parfy in St John's College, Cambridge^ this Hail
and Faracell was read to I/if $?/f.vŁ, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
BY all sweet memory of the saints and sages
Who wrought among us in the clays of yore ;
By youth who, turning now life's early pages,
Ripen to match the worthies gone before ;
On us, 0 son of England's greatest daughter,
A kindly word from heart and tongue bestow;
Then chase the sunsets oVr the western water
And hear our blessing with you as you go,
A Poet and fits Trees
IF it is something to make two blades of grass grow where only one
was growing, it is much more to have been the occasion of the
planting of an oak which shall defy twenty scores of winters, or of an
elm which shall canopy with its green cloud of foliage half as many
generations of mortal immortalities.
I have written many verses, but the best poems 1 have produced
are the trees I planted on the hillside that overlooks the broad
meadows. Nature finds rhymes for them in the recurring measures
of the seasons. Winter strips them of their ornaments and gives
them, as it were, in prose translation ; am! Summer clothes them in
all the splendour of their leafy language. Oliver IVcndeJl Holmes
A Child Asleep
ryiiou slecpcst—but when wilt thou wake, fair child ?
JL When the fawn awakes in the forest wild ?
When the lark's wing mounts with the breeze of morn ?
When the first rich breath of the rose is born ?
Lonely thou slecpcst! yet something lies
Too deep and still on thy soft-scaled eyes ;
Mournful, though sweet, is thy rest to sec :
When will the hour of thy rising be ?
Not when the fawn wakes ; not when the lark
On the crimson cloud of the morn floats dark*
Grief with vain passionate tears hath wot
The hair, shedding gleams from thy pale brow yet;
Loves with, sad kisses unfelt, hath pressed
Thy meek»dropt eyelids and quiet breast;
And the glad spring, calling out bird and bee.
Shall colour all blossoms, fair child, but thcc,
Thou'rt gone from uss bright one 1 That thou should'st die.
And life be left to the butterfly 1
Felicia Hemans, on looking at «
Chantry monument of a child sleeping