Under the wide and starry sky

An’ siller, that ’s sae braw to keep, is brawer still to gi’e.It ’s gey an’ easy spierin’, says the beggar-wife to me.Oh, I wad like to ken—to the beggar-wife says I—Hoo a’things come to be whaur we find them when we try,The lasses in their claes an’ the fishes in the sea.It ’s gey…

And from the door of where the eternal dwell,Looked back on human things and smiled farewell.O may this grief remain the only one!O may our house be still a garrisonOf smiling children, and for evermoreThe tune of little feet be heard along the floor!

Under the May’s whole Heaven of blue;Or whether on the sofa you,No grown up person being by,Do some soft corner occupy;Take you this volume in your handsAnd enter into other lands,For lo! (as children feign) supposeYou, hunting in the garden rows,Or in the lumbered attic, orThe cellar – a nail-studded doorAnd dark, descending stairway foundThat…

And how his faceWoke to trill and caroletteAll the cages that were setAbout the place.In the tender morning lightAll around lay strange and brightAnd still and sweet,And the gray doves unafraidWent their morning promenadeAlong the street.

And mock the uneven modern flight,But in the streamOf daily sorrow and delightTo seek a theme.I too, O friend, have steeled my heartBoldly to choose the better part,To leave the beaten ways of art,And wholly freeTo dare, beyond the scanty chart,The deeper sea.All vain restrictions left behind,Frail bark! I loose my anchored mindAnd large, before…

In summer quite the other way,I have to go to bed by day.I have to go to bed and seeThe birds still hopping on the tree,Or hear the grown-up people’s feetStill going past me in the street.And does it not seem hard to you,When all the sky is clear and blue,And I should like so…