Read "The First Cricket" by William Dean Howells online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Ah me! is it then true that the year has waxed unto waning, / And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay, -- / Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining, / All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?
Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber, / Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh moan, / Yet with th' unconscious earth's boded evil my soul thou dost cumber, / And in the year's lost youth makest me still lose my own.
Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and bleakest, / And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room, / And by my hearthstone gay, as now sad in my garden, thou creakest, -- / Thou wilt again give me all, -- dew and fragrance and bloom?
Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing, / If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf, / Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling, / Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and -- himself:
Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers / Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the bird to his tree. / Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet lingers, / Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?