All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women:

Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:

Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;

Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,

Earth seem’d a desert I was bound to traverse,

Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,

Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?

So might we talk of the old familiar faces —

How some they have died, and some they have left me,

And some are taken from me; all are departed —

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Hester

When maidens such as Hester die

Their place ye may not well supply,

Though ye among a thousand try

With vain endeavour.

A month or more hath she been dead,

Yet cannot I by force be led

To think upon the wormy bed

And her together.

A springy motion in her gait,

A rising step, did indicate

Of pride and joy no common rate,

That flush’d her spirit:

I know not by what name beside

I shall it call: if ’twas not pride,

It was a joy to that allied,

She did inherit.

Her parents held the Quaker rule,

Which doth the human feeling cool;

But she was train’d in Nature’s school;

Nature had blest her.

A waking eye, a prying mind;

A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;

A hawk’s keen sight ye cannot blind;

Ye could not Hester.

My sprightly neighbour! gone before

To that unknown and silent shore,

Shall we not meet, as heretofore,

Some summer morning —

When from thy cheerful eyes a ray

Hath struck a bliss upon the day,

A bliss that would not go away,

A sweet forewarning?

The Great Grandfather

My father’s grandfather lives still,

His age is fourscore years and ten;

He looks a monument of time,

The agedest of aged men.

Though years lie on him like a load,

A happier man you will not see

Than he, whenever he can get

His great grandchildren on his knee.

When we our parents have displeased,

He stands between us as a screen;

By him our good deeds in the sun,

Our bad ones in the shade are seen.

His love’s a line that’s long drawn out,

Yet lasteth firm unto the end;

His heart is oak, yet unto us

It like the gentlest reed can bend.

A fighting soldier he has been —

Yet by his manners you would guess,

That he his whole long life had spent

In scenes of country quietness.

His talk is all of things long past,

For modern facts no pleasure yield —

Of the famed year of forty-five,

Of William, and Culloden’s field.

The deeds of this eventful age,

Which princes from their thrones have hurled,

Can no more interest wake in him

Than stories of another world.

When I his length of days revolve,

How like a strong tree he hath stood,

It brings into my mind almost

Those patriarchs old before the flood.

Suffer Little Children, And Forbid Them Not, To Come Unto Me

To Jesus our Saviour some parents presented

Their children-what fears and what hopes they must feel!

When this the disciples would fain have prevented,

Our Saviour reproved their unseasonable zeal.

Not only free leave to come to him was given

But ’of such’ were the blessed words Christ our Lord spake,

‘Of such is composed the kingdom of heaven:’

The disciples, abashëd, perceived their mistake.

With joy then the parents their children brought nigher

And earnestly begged that his hands he would lay