Thy Mexican pistoles, That Antwerp monks may sing a mass Keep watch and ward to-night! And mocked the counsel of the wise Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers! Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest, 'The young fawns are playing in the shadows, The young flowers are blowing from the west; But the young, young children, O my brothers! They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, Do you question the young children in their sorrow, Why their tears are falling so? The old man may weep for his to-morrow Which is lost in long ago. The old tree is leafless in the forest, The old year is ending in the frost; The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest, Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, They look up with their pale and sunken faces, For the man's grief abhorrent draws and presses "Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary;" "Our young feet," they say, are very Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— Our grave-rest is very far to seek! weak! Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, For the outside earth is cold, And we young ones stand without, in our bewild’ring, And the graves are for the old." "True," say the young children, "it may happen That we die before our time! Little Alice died last year,—the grave is shapen We looked into the pit prepared to take her, If you listen by that grave in sun and shower, With your ear down, little Alice never cries; Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her, The shroud, by the kirk-chime! It is good when it happens," say the children, "That we die before our time!" Alas, the young children! they are seeking They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, Go out, children, from the mine and from the city, Pluck handfuls of the meadow cowslips pretty, your Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them through! But they answer, Are your cowslips of the meadows 66 Like the weeds anear the mine?1 Leave us quiet in the dark of our coal-shadows, "For oh!" say the children, we are weary, And we cannot run or leap: If we cared for any meadows, it were merely 1 A commissioner mentions the fact of weeds being thus confounded with the idea of flowers. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping; And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, The reddest flowers would look as pale as snow; For all day, we drag our burden tiring, Through the coal-dark underground, Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron In the factories round and round. "For all day the wheels are droning, turning, Their wind comes in our faces! Till our hearts turn, and our heads with pulses burning, Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling, "O ye wheels (breaking out in a mad moaning), Ay, be silent! let them hear each other breathing, For a moment, mouth to mouth; Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing Of their tender human youth; Let them feel that this cold metallic motion Is not all the life God fashions or reveals; Let them prove their inward souls against the notion That they live in you, or under you, O wheels! Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward, Grinding life down from its mark! And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward, Spin on blindly in the dark. Now tell the poor young children, O my To look up to Him and pray, brothers! So the blessed One who blesseth all the others, They answer: Who is God that He should hear us, Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him, Two words, indeed, of praying we remember; "Our Father!' looking upward in the chamber, We know no other words except 'Our Father!' And we think that, in some pause of angels' song, God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather, And hold both within His right hand, which is strong. Our Father! If He heard us, He would surely— For they call him good and mild Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, Come and rest with me, my child.' The report of the commissioners presents repeated instances of children whose religious devotion is confined to the repetition of the first two words of the Lord's Prayer. |