| |
| TWENTY-SEVEN paces in front, | |
| And barely eleven deep, | |
| Lights in every window but it,— | |
| Are they dead, or do they sleep? | |
| |
| The merry gossips of Stratford | 5 |
| Gossip in shops all round,— | |
| From that untenanted mansion | |
| There cometh not a sound. | |
| |
| If you knock you will get no answer,— | |
| Knock reverently and low, | 10 |
| For the sake of one who was living there | |
| Three hundred years ago. | |
| |
| He was born in the upper chamber, | |
| Had playmates down the street; | |
| They noted at school, when he read the lesson, | 15 |
| That his voice was soft and sweet. | |
| |
| His father, they say, was a glover, | |
| Though that is not so clear; | |
| He married his sweetheart at Shottery, | |
| When he came to his nineteenth year. | 20 |
| |
| And then he left old Stratford, | |
| And nobody missed him much, | |
| For Stratford, a thriving burgh, | |
| Took little account of such. | |
| |
| But somehow it came to be whispered, | 25 |
| When some short years had flown, | |
| That the glover’s son was making himself | |
| A credit to that good town. | |
| |
| The best folks scarcely believed it, | |
| And dreamily shook their head,— | 30 |
| But the world was owning the archer | |
| Whose arrows of light had sped; | |
| |
| Whose arrows were brightening space | |
| With fire unknown before, | |
| Plucked from a grander quiver | 35 |
| Than Phœbus-Apollo bore. | |
| |
| So his birthplace came to be famous, | |
| And the ground where his bones were laid, | |
| And to Stratford, the thriving burgh, | |
| Nations their pilgrimage made. | 40 |
| |
| They saw the tenantless dwelling, | |
| They saw the bare flat stone; | |
| But the soul that had brightened the world | |
| Still lived to brighten their own. | |
| |
| And they learned the sacred lesson, | 45 |
| That he whom the proud eschew, | |
| The simplest and the lowliest, | |
| May have God’s best work to do. | |
| |
