Envoy for "a Child's Garden of Verses"

WHETHER upon the garden seat / You lounge with your uplifted feet / Under the May's whole Heaven of blue; / Or whether on the sofa you, / No grown up person being by, / Do some soft corner occupy; / Take you this volume in your hands / And enter into other lands, / For lo! (as children feign) suppose / You, hunting in the garden rows, / Or in the lumbered attic, or / The cellar-a nail-studded door / And dark, descending stairway found / That led to kingdoms underground: / There standing, you should hear with ease / Strange birds a-singing, or the trees / Swing in big robber woods, or bells / On many fairy citadels:

There passing through (a step or so- / Neither mamma nor nurse need know! ) / From your nice nurseries you would pass, / Like Alice through the Looking-Glass / Or Gerda following Little Ray, / To wondrous countries far away.