| |
| NOT what we would, but what we must, | |
| Makes up the sum of living; | |
| Heaven is both more and less than just | |
| In taking and in giving. | |
| Swords cleave to hands that sought the plough, | 5 |
| And laurels miss the soldier’s brow. | |
| |
| Me, whom the city holds, whose feet | |
| Have worn its stony highways, | |
| Familiar with its loneliest street— | |
| Its ways were never my ways. | 10 |
| My cradle was beside the sea, | |
| And there, I hope, my grave will be. | |
| |
| Old homestead! In that old, gray town, | |
| Thy vane is seaward blowing, | |
| The slip of garden stretches down | 15 |
| To where the tide is flowing: | |
| Below they lie, their sails all furled, | |
| The ships that go about the world. | |
| |
| Dearer that little country house, | |
| Inland, with pines beside it; | 20 |
| Some peach-trees, with unfruitful boughs, | |
| A well, with weeds to hide it: | |
| No flowers, or only such as rise | |
| Self-sown, poor things, which all despise. | |
| |
| Dear country home! Can I forget | 25 |
| The least of thy sweet trifles? | |
| The window-vines that clamber yet, | |
| Whose bloom the bee still rifles? | |
| The roadside blackberries, growing ripe, | |
| And in the woods the Indian Pipe? | 30 |
| |
| Happy the man who tills his field, | |
| Content with rustic labor; | |
| Earth does to him her fulness yield, | |
| Hap what may to his neighbor. | |
| Well days, sound nights, oh, can there be | 35 |
| A life more rational and free? | |
| |
| Dear country life of child and man! | |
| For both the best, the strongest, | |
| That with the earliest race began, | |
| And hast outlived the longest: | 40 |
| Their cities perished long ago; | |
| Who the first farmers were we know. | |
| |
| Perhaps our Babels too will fall; | |
| If so, no lamentations, | |
| For Mother Earth will shelter all, | 45 |
| And feed the unborn nations; | |
| Yes, and the swords that menace now, | |
| Will then be beaten to the plough. | |
| |
