The Seasons.
A blue-eyed child that sits amid the noon,1
O’erhung with a laburnum’s drooping sprays,2
Singing her little songs, while softly round3
Along the grass the chequered sunshine plays.4
All beauty that is throned in womanhood,5
Pacing a summer garden’s fountained walks,6
That stoops to smooth a glossy spaniel down,7
To hide her flushing cheek from one who talks.8
A happy mother with her fair-faced girls,9
In whose sweet spring again her youth she sees,10
With shout and dance and laugh and bound and
song,11
song,11
Stripping an autumn orchard’s laden trees.12
An aged woman in a wintry room ;13
Frost on the pane,—without, the whirling snow ;14
Reading old letters of her far-off youth,15
Of pleasures past and joys of long ago.16