English Poems

_Dear Sister: Hear the conclusion of the whole matter. You dream like mad, you love like tinder, you aspire like a star-struck moth--for what? That you may hive little lyrics, and sell to a publisher for thirty pieces of silver.

Hard by us here is a 'bee-farm.' It always reminds me of a publisher's. The bee has loved a thousand flowers, through a hundred afternoons, he has filled little sacred cells with the gold of his stolen kisses--for what? That the whole should be wrenched away and sold at so much 'the comb'--as though it were a hair-comb. 'Mummy is become merchandise ... and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.'

Can we ever forget those old mornings when we rose with the lark, and, while the earliest sunlight slanted through the sleeping house, stole to the little bookclad study to read--Heaven bless us!--you, perhaps, Mary Wollstonecraft, and I, Livy, in a Froben folio of 1531!!

Will you accept these old verses in memory of those old mornings? Ah, then came in the sweet o' the year.