Page:Poems that every child should know (ed. Burt, 1904).djvu/176

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Poems That Every Child Should Know

When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I;
Oh, take me to my kind old mudder!
Dere let me live and die.


One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love,
Still sadly to my memory rushes,
No matter where I rove.
When will I see de bees a-humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo tumming,
Down in my good old home?


All de world am sad and dreary,
Eberywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!

Stephen Collins Foster.


The Wreck of the "Hesperus."

"The Wreck of the Hesperus," by Longfellow (1807-82), on "Norman's Woe," off the coast near Cape Ann, is a historic poem as well as an imaginative composition.

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.


Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May.