| |
| WHEN on the breath of autumn breeze, | |
| From pastures dry and brown, | |
| Goes floating like an idle thought | |
| The fair white thistle-down, | |
| Oh then what joy to walk at will | 5 |
| Upon the golden harvest hill! | |
| |
| What joy in dreamy ease to lie | |
| Amid a field new shorn, | |
| And see all round on sun-lit slopes | |
| The pil’d-up stacks of corn; | 10 |
| And send the fancy wandering o’er | |
| All pleasant harvest-fields of yore. | |
| |
| I feel the day—I see the field, | |
| The quivering of the leaves, | |
| And good old Jacob and his house | 15 |
| Binding the yellow sheaves; | |
| And at this very hour I seem | |
| To be with Joseph in his dream. | |
| |
| I see the fields of Bethlehem | |
| And reapers many a one, | 20 |
| Bending unto their sickles’ stroke, | |
| And Boaz looking on; | |
| And Ruth, the Moabite so fair, | |
| Among the gleaners stooping there. | |
| |
| Again I see a little child, | 25 |
| His mother’s sole delight, | |
| God’s living gift of love unto | |
| The kind good Shunammite; | |
| To mortal pangs I see him yield, | |
| And the lad bear him from the field. | 30 |
| |
| The sun-bath’d quiet of the hills, | |
| The fields of Galilee, | |
| That eighteen hundred years ago | |
| Were full of corn, I see; | |
| And the dear Saviour takes his way | 35 |
| ’Mid ripe ears on the Sabbath day. | |
| |
| Oh, golden fields of bending corn, | |
| How beautiful they seem! | |
| The reaper-folk, the pil’d-up sheaves, | |
| To me are like a dream. | 40 |
| The sunshine and the very air | |
| Seem of old time, and take me there. | |
| |
