Poems Every Child Should Know eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 356 pages of information about Poems Every Child Should Know.

Poems Every Child Should Know eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 356 pages of information about Poems Every Child Should Know.
    Long loved and for a season gone;
    For thee her poet’s lyre is wreathed,
    Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
    For thee she rings the birthday bells;
    Of thee her babe’s first lisping tells;
    For thine her evening prayer is said
    At palace-couch and cottage-bed;
    Her soldier, closing with the foe,
    Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow,
    His plighted maiden, when she fears
    For him the joy of her young years,
    Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;
      And she, the mother of thy boys,
    Though in her eye and faded cheek
    Is read the grief she will not speak,
      The memory of her buried joys,
    And even she who gave thee birth,
    Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
      Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
    For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s: 
    One of the few, the immortal names,
      That were not born to die.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

 THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON.

“The Death of Napoleon,” by Isaac McClellan (1806-99), was yet another of the good old reader songs taught us by a teacher of good taste.  We love those teachers more the older we grow.

    Wild was the night, yet a wilder night
      Hung round the soldier’s pillow;
    In his bosom there waged a fiercer fight
      Than the fight on the wrathful billow.

    A few fond mourners were kneeling by,
      The few that his stern heart cherished;
    They knew, by his glazed and unearthly eye,
      That life had nearly perished.

    They knew by his awful and kingly look,
      By the order hastily spoken,
    That he dreamed of days when the nations shook,
      And the nations’ hosts were broken.

    He dreamed that the Frenchman’s sword still slew,
      And triumphed the Frenchman’s eagle,
    And the struggling Austrian fled anew,
      Like the hare before the beagle.

    The bearded Russian he scourged again,
      The Prussian’s camp was routed,
    And again on the hills of haughty Spain
      His mighty armies shouted.

    Over Egypt’s sands, over Alpine snows,
      At the pyramids, at the mountain,
    Where the wave of the lordly Danube flows,
      And by the Italian fountain,

    On the snowy cliffs where mountain streams
      Dash by the Switzer’s dwelling,
    He led again, in his dying dreams,
      His hosts, the proud earth quelling.

    Again Marengo’s field was won,
      And Jena’s bloody battle;
    Again the world was overrun,
      Made pale at his cannon’s rattle.

    He died at the close of that darksome day,
      A day that shall live in story;
    In the rocky land they placed his clay,
     “And left him alone with his glory.”

ISAAC MCCLELLAN.

 HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE.

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Project Gutenberg
Poems Every Child Should Know from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.