(Ah, good painter, you can’t paint sound!)—­
    These, and the house where I was born,
  Low and little, and black and old,
  With children, many as it can hold,
  All at the windows, open wide,—­
  Heads and shoulders clear outside,
  And fair young faces all ablush: 
    Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
    Roses crowding the self-same way,
  Out of a wilding, way-side bush.

    Listen closer.  When you have done
       With woods and cornfields and grazing herds,
    A lady, the loveliest ever the sun
  Looked down upon, you must paint for me: 
  Oh, if I only could make you see
    The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
  The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
  The woman’s soul, and the angel’s face
    That are beaming on me all the while! 
     I need not speak these foolish words: 
    Yet one word tells you all I would say,—­
  She is my mother:  you will agree
    That all the rest may be thrown away.

  Two little urchins at her knee
  You must paint, Sir:  one like me,—­
      The other with a clearer brow,
    And the light of his adventurous eyes
    Flashing with boldest enterprise: 
  At ten years old he went to sea,—­
       God knoweth if he be living now,—­
     He sailed in the good ship “Commodore,”—­
  Nobody ever crossed her track
  To bring us news, and she never came back. 
    Ah, ’tis twenty long years and more
  Since that old ship went out of the bay
    With my great-hearted brother on her deck: 
   I watched him till he shrank to a speck,
  And his face was toward me all the way.

  Bright his hair was, a golden brown,
     The time we stood at our mother’s knee: 
  That beauteous head, if it did go down,
    Carried sunshine into the sea!

  Out in the fields one summer night
    We were together, half afraid
    Of the corn-leaves’ rustling, and of the shade
       Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,—­
  Loitering till after the low little light
    Of the candle shone through the open door,
  And over the hay-stack’s pointed top,
  All of a tremble, and ready to drop,
       The first half-hour, the great yellow star,
    That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,
  Had often and often watched to see
    Propped and held in its place in the skies

  By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,
    Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew,—­
  Dead at the top,—­just one branch full
  Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,
    From which it tenderly shook the dew
  Over our heads, when we came to play
  In its handbreadth of shadow, day after day. 
    Afraid to go home, Sir; for one of us bore
  A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,—­
  The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
  Not so big as a straw of wheat: 
  The berries we gave her she wouldn’t eat,
  But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
  So slim and shining, to keep her still.