I love the lyric muse! 
  Be not ashamed, O noble friend,
    In honest gratitude to pay
  Thy homage to the gods that send
    This boon to charm all ill away. 
  With solemn tenderness revere
    This voiceful glory as a shrine
  Wherein the quickened heart may hear
    The counsels of a voice divine!

MARTHY’S YOUNKIT.

  The mountain brook sung lonesomelike
    And loitered on its way
  Ez if it waited for a child
    To jine it in its play;
  The wild flowers of the hillside
    Bent down their heads to hear
  The music of the little feet
    That had, somehow, grown so dear;
  The magpies, like winged shadders,
    Wuz a-flutterin’ to and fro
  Among the rocks and holler stumps
    In the ragged gulch below;
  The pines ’nd hemlock tosst their boughs
    (Like they wuz arms) ’nd made
  Soft, sollum music on the slope
    Where he had often played. 
  But for these lonesome, sollum voices
    On the mountain side,
  There wuz no sound the summer day
    That Marthy’s younkit died.

  We called him Marthy’s younkit,
    For Marthy wuz the name
  Uv her ez wuz his mar, the wife
    Uv Sorry Tom—­the same
  Ez taught the school-house on the hill
    Way back in sixty-nine
  When she married Sorry Tom wich ownt
    The Gosh-all-Hemlock mine;
  And Marthy’s younkit wuz their first,
    Wich, bein’ how it meant
  The first on Red Hoss mountain,
    Wuz trooly a event! 
  The miners sawed off short on work
    Es soon ez they got word
  That Dock Devine allowed to Casey
    What had just occurred;
  We loaded ’nd whooped around
    Until we all wuz hoarse,
  Salutin’ the arrival,
    Wich weighed ten pounds, uv course!

  Three years, and sech a pretty child! 
    His mother’s counterpart—­
  Three years, and sech a holt ez he
    Had got on every heart! 
  A peert and likely little tyke
    With hair ez red ez gold,
  A laughin’, toddlin’ everywhere—­
    And only three years old! 
  Up yonder, sometimes, to the store,
    And sometimes down the hill
  He kited (boys is boys, you know—­
    You couldn’t keep him still!)
  And there he’d play beside the brook
    Where purpel wild flowers grew
  And the mountain pines ’nd hemlocks
    A kindly shadder threw
  And sung soft, sollum toons to him,
    While in the gulch below
  The magpies, like strange sperrits,
    Went flutterin’ to and fro.

  Three years, and then the fever come;
    It wuzn’t right, you know,
  With all us old ones in the camp,
    For that little child to go! 
  It’s right the old should die, but that
    A harmless little child
  Should miss the joy uv life ’nd love—­
    That can’t be reconciled! 
  That’s what we thought that summer