Francis Thompson

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of read more

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul.

I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
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I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.

There is no expeditious road
To pack and label men for God,
And save them by the read more

There is no expeditious road
To pack and label men for God,
And save them by the barrel-load.
Some may perchance, with strange surprise,
Have blundered into Paradise.

She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings read more

She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.

The immortal could we cease to contemplate,
The mortal part suggests its every trait.
God laid His read more

The immortal could we cease to contemplate,
The mortal part suggests its every trait.
God laid His fingers on the ivories
Of her pure members as on smoothed keys,
And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies.