thro’. 
        Give us new flesh, new birth.  Elect of heav’n
        May we become; in thine election sure
        Contain’d, and to one purpose stedfast drawn,
        Our soul’s salvation!

                              Thou, and I, dear friend,
        With filial recognition sweet, shall know
        One day the face of our dear mother in heaven;
        And her remember’d looks of love shall greet
        With looks of answering love; her placid smiles
        Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand
        With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse. 
        Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask
        Those days of vanity to return again
        (Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give),
        Vain loves and wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid,
        Child of the dust as I am, who so long
        My captive heart steep’d in idolatry
        And creature-loves.  Forgive me, O my Maker! 
        If in a mood of grief I sin almost
        In sometimes brooding on the days long past,
        And from the grave of time wishing them back,
        Days of a mother’s fondness to her child,
        Her little one.

                        O where be now those sports,
        And infant play-games? where the joyous troops
        Of children, and the haunts I did so love? 
        O my companions, O ye loved names
        Of friend or playmate dear; gone are ye now;
        Gone diverse ways; to honour and credit some,
        And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame! 
        I only am left, with unavailing grief
        To mourn one parent dead, and see one live
        Of all life’s joys bereft and desolate: 
        Am left with a few friends, and one, above
        The rest, found faithful in a length of years,
        Contented as I may, to bear me on
        To the not unpeaceful evening of a day
        Made black by morning storms!

September, 1797.

WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM

Thou should’st have longer liv’d, and to the grave
Have peacefully gone down in full old age! 
Thy children would have tended thy gray hairs. 
We might have sat, as we have often done,
By our fireside, and talk’d whole nights away,
Old times, old friends, and old events recalling;
With many a circumstance, of trivial note,
To memory dear, and of importance grown. 
How shall we tell them in a stranger’s ear? 
A wayward son ofttimes was I to thee;
And yet, in all our little bickerings,
Domestic jars, there was, I know not what,
Of tender feeling, that were ill exchang’d
For this world’s chilling friendships, and their smiles
Familiar, whom the heart calls strangers still. 
A heavy lot hath he, most wretched man! 
Who lives the last of all his family. 
He looks around him, and his eye discerns