Explore "The Grandsire" by Eugene Field on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I loved him so; his voice had grown / Into my heart, and now to hear / The pretty song he had sung so long / Die on the lips to me so dear! / _He_ a child with golden curls, / And I with head as white as snow -- / I knelt down there and made this pray'r: / "God, let me be the first to go!"
How often I recall it now: / My darling tossing on his bed, / I sitting there in mute despair, / Smoothing the curls that crowned his head.
They did not speak to me of death -- / A feeling _here_ had told me so; / What could I say or do but pray / That I might be the first to go?
Yet, thinking of him standing there / Out yonder as the years go by, / Waiting for me to come, I see / 'Twas better he should wait, not I.
For when I walk the vale of death, / Above the wail of Jordan's flow / Shall rise a song that shall make me strong -- / The call of the child that was first to go.