To a Child by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Read

Dear child! how radiant on thy mother's knee, / With merry-making eyes and jocund smiles, / Thou gazest at the painted tiles, / Whose figures grace, / With many a grotesque form and face. / The ancient chimney of thy nursery! / The lady with the gay macaw, / The dancing girl, the grave bashaw / With bearded lip and chin; / And, leaning idly o'er his gate, / Beneath the imperial fan of state, / The Chinese mandarin.

With what a look of proud command / Thou shakest in thy little hand / The coral rattle with its silver bells, / Making a merry tune! / Thousands of years in Indian seas / That coral grew, by slow degrees, / Until some deadly and wild monsoon / Dashed it on Coromandel's sand! / Those silver bells / Reposed of yore, / As shapeless ore, / Far down in the deep-sunken wells / Of darksome mines, / In some obscure and sunless place, / Beneath huge Chimborazo's base, / Or Potosi's o'erhanging pines / And thus for thee, O little child, / Through many a danger and escape, / The tall ships passed the stormy cape; / For thee in foreign lands remote, / Beneath a burning, tropic clime, / The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat, / Himself as swift and wild, / In falling, clutched the frail arbute, / The fibres of whose shallow root, / Uplifted from the soil, betrayed / The silver veins beneath it laid, / The buried treasures of the miser, Time.