Your beauty, like a queen’s or king’s
Good word, gives price to common things: 
That can your ruddy fingers hold
Hangs lovelier there than purest gold;
And, as the poor, grown rich by chance,
Run raptured in extravagance,
My fancy riots in the fields’
Increasing wealth its charter yields: 
And at your lintel, by the bower
Of vine leaves screening noonday heat;
The grapes, that hang there small and sour,
Are soft in bloom and more than sweet!

Beholding kittens as they play,
Black, tortoise, white, or silver grey;
Or ducklings on the water glide,
Yellow and soft, and artless eyed: 
Or neatly-shapen chicks astray,
Pecking incessantly on their way;
Each such a trim completed creature,
In perfect movement, hue, and feature: 
A foolish sadness makes me sigh
They lack immutability. 
But you, my Nelly, are ever young. 
Fresh and happy you dwell among
The brightest flowers, and flourish where
Meadows are ever fresh and fair. 
As you were then I see you now,
Standing beneath an apple bough;
Your face amid its blossoms, bright
With rosy laughter and delight,
You seem a blossom the partial sun
Has chosen to make a larger one.

What may your pilgrimage have been,
Since both of us lost our Eden days,
I never rashly tried to glean;
And know not if your childhood ways
Were trodden by your maiden feet
When, flushed and shy with hope and fear,
You went your loitering swain to meet
And listen to sounds you loved to hear! 
But if sometimes your heart was fain
Along our honeysuckle lane
Again to roam, in gracious flight
Your memory would have found delight
In wandering there a child again! 
   And if a matron you became,
With a matron’s worries and daily strife;
The pain and sorrow, the hurt and blame
Mixed with pleasure, of being a wife,
I know not.  But of this am sure,
That if with daughters you were blessed,
They found your bright example lure,
Thro’ ways by wisdom proven best,
And sympathetic, generous trust
To kindly conduct more than just. 
   If old experience yet holds true,
And by a generation’s lapse
Your daughter’s child resembles you,
Then by that happy law perhaps
Another Nelly may be seen
To grace some other village green;
As native there as morning dew;
Or larks aloft, when lost to view
They lift us thro’ the trembling blue
To soar with them in ecstasy;
Or primroses, whose welcome faces
From sunny banks and shady places,
Tenderly glimmer in pallid gold
Caught as early morning broke,
When, dreaming daylight they awoke
Enamoured from the moistened mold. 
And if a Nelly, tho’ changed in name,
Her fair endowments will the same
Point every grace that charmed before
Thro’ unrenowned ancestresses,
Then still there beams a joy that blesses
The traveller by your cottage door;
Who, pleased in after years to trace
Remembrance of your playful face,
May linger on your presence while
Before him still you turn to smile.