| THE RED room with the giant bed | |
| Where none but elders laid their head; | |
| The little room where you and I | |
| Did for awhile together lie | |
| And, simple suitor, I your hand | 5 |
| In decent marriage did demand; | |
| The great day nursery, best of all, | |
| With pictures pasted on the wall | |
| And leaves upon the blind— | |
| A pleasant room wherein to wake | 10 |
| And hear the leafy garden shake | |
| And rustle in the wind— | |
| And pleasant there to lie in bed | |
| And see the pictures overhead— | |
| The wars about Sebastopol, | 15 |
| The grinning guns along the wall, | |
| The daring escalade, | |
| The plunging ships, the bleating sheep, | |
| The happy children ankle-deep | |
| And laughing as they wade: | 20 |
| All these are vanished clean away, | |
| And the old manse is changed to-day; | |
| It wears an altered face | |
| And shields a stranger race. | |
| The river, on from mill to mill, | 25 |
| Flows past our childhood’s garden still; | |
| But ah! we children never more | |
| Shall watch it from the water-door! | |
| Below the yew—it still is there— | |
| Our phantom voices haunt the air | 30 |
| As we were still at play, | |
| And I can hear them call and say: | |
| “How far is it to Babylon?” | |
| |
| Ah, far enough, my dear, | |
| Far, far enough from here— | 35 |
| Yet you have farther gone! | |
| “Can I get there by candlelight?” | |
| So goes the old refrain. | |
| I do not know—perchance you might— | |
| But only, children, hear it right, | 40 |
| Ah, never to return again! | |
| The eternal dawn, beyond a doubt, | |
| Shall break on hill and plain, | |
| And put all stars and candles out | |
| Ere we be young again. | 45 |
| To you in distant India, these | |
| I send across the seas, | |
| Nor count it far across. | |
| For which of us forgets | |
| The Indian cabinets, | 50 |
| The bones of antelope, the wings of albatross, | |
| The pied and painted birds and beans, | |
| The junks and bangles, beads and screens | |
| The gods and sacred bells, | |
| And the loud-humming, twisted shells! | 55 |
| The level of the parlour floor | |
| Was honest, homely, Scottish shore; | |
| But when we climbed upon a chair, | |
| Behold the gorgeous East was there! | |
| Be this a fable; and behold | 60 |
| Me in the parlour as of old, | |
| And Minnie just above me set | |
| In the quaint Indian cabinet! | |
| Smiling and kind, you grace a shelf | |
| Too high for me to reach myself. | 65 |
| Reach down a hand, my dear, and take | |
| These rhymes for old acquaintance’ sake! | |
