Sown by youthful hands,
Grow to bless the nations
Far in heathen lands.
As late as 1946, when Elizabeth Hough Schrist based her One Thousand Poems for Children on Ingpen’s earlier anthology, the poem was still credited to Brewer and had his added final stanza.
The next to last line of the original poem was, “Make this pleasant earth below.” When the poem appeared as a singing exercise in a school textbook, it was changed to “Make our earth an Eden.” Carney did not like this, so she altered the line to its present “Help to make earth happy.”
Carney’s husband was a Universalist minister who pastored churches in many different U. S. cities, including Chicago and Beloit, Wisconsin. After he died in 1871, Carney settled in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
I know of no book by this poet. Of her many other deeply spiritual poems, the one appearing most often in hymn books of the time was “Think Gently of the Erring.” It is hard to find two versions exactly alike. The one here is from an undated London book titled Christian Lyrics. The poem has no byline, nor does the book name its compiler.
Little Things
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
So the little moments,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of eternity.
So our little errors
Lead the soul away
From the path of virtue,
Far in sin to stray.
Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the heaven above.
Think Gently of the Erring
Think gently of the erring:
Ye know not of the power
With which the dark temptation came
In some unguarded hour.
Ye may not know how earnestly
They struggled, or how well,
Until the hour of weakness came
And sadly thus they fell.
Think gently of the erring:
Oh! do not thou forget,
However darkly stained by sin,
He is thy brother yet;
Heir of the selfsame heritage,
Child of the selfsame God,
He has but stumbled in the path
Thou hast in weakness trod.
Speak gently to the erring:
For is it not enough
That innocence and peace have gone,
Without thy censure rough?
It sure must be a weary lot,
That sin-stained heart to bear,
And those who share a happier fate
Their chidings well may spare.
Speak gently to the erring:
Thou yet may’st lead them back
With holy words and tones of love,
From misery’s thorny track:
Forget not thou hast often sinned,
And sinful yet must be;
Deal gently with the erring, then,
As God has dealt with thee.
WILLIAM HERBERT CARRUTH
(1859–1924)
ALL INFORMED theists today take for granted that evolution is God’s technique for creating the cosmos and the life we know. Carruth, who was born the same year Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, gave this assumption an eloquent expression in the first stanza of his one famous poem.
Carruth was born at Osawatomie, Kansas, and obtained a Harvard Ph.D. in 1893. He taught modern languages and German literature at the University of Kansas, where he was vice-president from 1887 until 1913. In 1913 he became a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.
“Each in His Own Tongue” was first published in 1906, though I don’t know where. It was included in Each in His Own Tongue and Other Poems (1908). I own a small book printing of the poem, illustrated in color by an unnamed artist, and published by Wise-Penslow, New York. There is no date, but the title page has a note saying the book was copyrighted in 1925 by P. F. Volland, suggesting an earlier edition.
Each in His Own Tongue
A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave-men dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod—
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite, tender sky,
The ripe rich tint of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high—
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the golden-rod—
Some of us call it Autumn
And others call it God.
Like tides on a crescent sea-beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in—
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod,—
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.
A picket frozen on duty,
A mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking the hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood;
And millions who, humble and nameless,
The straight, hard pathway plod,—
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God.
PHILA HENRIETTA CASE
(?–?)
ACCORDING TO The Star Speaker (1894 edition), edited by Flora Kightlinger, this poem was first published in Schoolday Magazine (March 1867), and set to music in 1892 by “E. D.” The poem appears in dozens of nineteenth-century anthologies, usually without credit or wrongly attributed to Phila H. Child. The poem could be written today about runaway teenaged girls who find themselves starving on big city streets.
Who was Phila Case? Did she write other poems? When and where did she live and die? The author of this once famous poem seems to have become “nobody’s poet.”
Nobody’s Child
Alone in the dreary, pitiless street,
With my torn old dress, and bare, cold feet,
All day I have wandered to and fro,
Hungry and shivering, and nowhere to go;
The night’s coming on in darkness and dread,
And the chill sleet beating upon my bare head.
Oh! why does the wind blow upon me so wild?
Is it because I am nobody’s child?
Just over the way there’s a flood of light,
And warmth and beauty, and all things bright;
Beautiful children, in robes so fair,
Are carolling songs in their rapture there.
I wonder if they, in their blissful glee,
Would pity a poor little beggar like me,
Wandering alone in the merciless street,
Naked and shivering, and nothing to eat?
Oh! what shall I do when the night comes down,
In its terrible blackness all over the town?
Shall I lay me down ’neath the angry sky,
On the cold, hard pavement, alone to die,
When the beautiful children their prayers have said,
And their mammas have tucked them up snugly in bed?
For no dear mother on me ever smiled,—
Why is it, I wonder, I’m nobody’s child?
No father, no mother, no sister, not one
In all the world loves me, e’en the little dogs run
When I wander too near them; ’tis wondrous to see,
How everything shrinks from a beggar like me!
Perhaps ’tis a dream; but sometimes, when I lie
Gazing far up in the dark blue sky,
Watching for hours, some large, bright star,
I fancy the beautiful gates are ajar,
And a host of white-robed nameless things,
Come fluttering o’er me on gilded wings;
A hand that is strangely soft and fair
Caresses gently my tangled hair,
And a voice like the carol of some wild bird—
The sweetest voice that was ever heard—
Calls me many a dear, pet name,
Till my heart and spirit are all aflame.
They tell me of such unbounded love,
And bid me come up to their home above;
And then with such pitiful, sad surprise,
They look at me with their sweet, tender eyes,
And it seems to me, out of the dreary night,
I am going up to that world of light;
And away from the hunger and storm so wild,
I am sure I shall then be somebody’s child.
RUTH CHESTERFIELD
(?-?)
“THE GRUMBLING OLD WOMAN” is anonymous in all old collections of verse I have seen except Flora Kightlinger’s The Star Speaker (n.d.) where it is credited to Ruth Chesterfield. John Foster Kirk’s Supplement to Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors (1891) has only this after her name: “New Version of Old Mother Hubbard, Boston, 1866.” I don’t know if this refers to the poem or to a book containing the poem.
The Grumbling Old Woman
There was an old woman, and—what do you think?—
She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink!
But though victuals and drink were the chief of her diet,
Yet this grumbling old woman never was quiet.
She had a nice cottage, a hen-house and barn,
And a sheep whose fine wool furnished blankets and yarn;
A cow that supplied her with butter and cheese,
A large flock of geese, and a hive full of bees.
Yet she grumbled and grumbled from morning till night,
For this foolish old woman thought nothing went right;
E’en the days of the week were all wrong, for on Sunday
She always declared that she wished it was Monday.
If cloudless and fair was the long summer day,
And the sun smiled down on the new-mown hay,
“There’s a drouth,” she said, “as sure as you’re born!
If it doesn’t rain soon, it will ruin the corn!”
But when descended the gentle rain,
Blessing the bountiful fields of grain,
And bringing new life to flower and bud,
She said there was coming a second flood.
She never gave aught to the needy and poor;
The outcast and hungry she turned from her door.
“Shall I work,” she said, with a wag of the head,
“To provide for the idle and lazy their bread?”
But the rich she regarded with envy and spite;
She said ‘twas a shame,—’twasn’t decent nor right,—
That the haughty old squire, with his bow-legged son,
Should ride with two horses, while she rode with one.
And the crabbed old fellow—to spite her, no doubt,—
Had built a new barn like a palace throughout,
With a cupola on it, as grand as you please,
And a rooster that whirled head and tail with the breeze.
“I wish, so I do,” she said, cocking her eye,
“There’d come a great whirlwind, and blow it sky-high!”
And e’en as she spoke, a loud rushing was heard,
And the barn to its very foundations was stirred.
It stood the shock bravely, but—pitiful sight!—
The wind took the old woman up like a kite!
As she sailed up aloft over forest and hill,
Her tongue, so they say, it kept wagging on still.
And where she alighted, no mortal doth know,
Or whether she ever alighted below.
MORAL.
My moral, my dears, you will find if you try;
And if you don’t find any, neither can I.
LYDIA MARIA (FRANCIS) CHILD
(1802–1880)
LYDIA MARIA CHILD was one of the nation’s most prolific nineteenth-century writers, as well as one of its most influential abolitionists. She was also an energetic advocate for women’s rights and the rights of Native Americans. She produced a two-volume History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835). Another two-volume tome, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans (1833), was the first book to detail the horrors of our country’s system of slavery. It created a sensation. In addition she wrote several historical novels (in one of them, Philothea [1836], Plato is a character), short stories, essays, biographies, histories and verse.
Born in Medford, Massachusetts, “Miss Francis” began her career as a private school teacher in Watertown. In 1826 she founded and for nine years edited the bimonthly Juvenile Miscellany, America’s first significant magazine for children. Sarah Josepha Hale’s poem about Mary’s little lamb first appeared in this magazine. Hale followed Child as editor, and later became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. It was she who persuaded Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.
In 1841 Child and her attorney husband David Lee Child moved to New York City to edit for four years the weekly Anti-Slavery Standard. Her colorful sketches of city life appeared in two volumes of Letters from New York. Process of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages, in three volumes, was her most ambitious work. She also found time to write one of the earliest books on home economics, The Frugal Housewife (1829; it had thirty-five editions), and a pioneering cookbook, The Mother’s Book (1831). The poet Whittier wrote a biographical introduction to a posthumous collection of her letters (1882) in which he called her a “wise and brave, but tender and loving woman.” His poem “Within the Gate” is a seventeen-stanza elegy on her death.
In almost all anthologies, “Thanksgiving Day” is severely truncated. Here you will find (thanks to Dr. Joseph Valeriani, of the Medford Historical Society) all twelve original stanzas. They first appeared in the second volume of Child’s Flowers for Children (1844); I do not know who first set it to a French folk tune. “Grandmother’s House” is sometimes substituted throughout for “grandfather’s house,” but as Dr. Valeriani points out, grandmother is not mentioned until the next to last stanza.
A short story by John O’Hara, “Over the River and Through the Wood,” takes its title from the first line of Child’s poem. In 1964 he included it in a book called The Horse Knows the Way, the third line of the same stanza.
With the exception of Child’s history of world religions, all her books mentioned here are currently in print, as well as a few of her other works. “Over the River and Through the Wood,” glowingly illustrated in color by Brinton Turkle, was published by Coward, McCann in 1974. It contains all twelve stanzas with spellings and punctuation slightly updated.
The old wooden drawbridge over the Mystic River in Medford has long been replaced by a granite and concrete one, and where Child’s ancestral home once stood, at the corner of Salem and Ashland, there is now a Chinese restaurant. About a mile away was the home of James S. Pierpont, who wrote the words and music of “Jingle Bells.”
Thanksgiving Day
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way,
To carry the sleigh,
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house away!
We would not stop
For doll or top,
For ’tis Thanksgiving day.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes
And bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river, and through the wood,
With a clear blue winter sky,
And children hark,
As we go jingling by.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To have a first-rate-play—
Hear the bells ring
Ting a ling ding,
Hurra for Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood—
No matter for winds that blow;
Or if we get
The sleigh upset,
Into a bank of snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To see little John and Ann;
We will kiss them all,
And play snow-ball,
And stay as long as we can.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Trot fast, my dapple gray!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting hound,
For ’tis Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood,
And straight through the barn-yard gate
We seem to go
Extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait.
Over the river, and through the wood—
Old Jowler hears our bells;
He shakes his paw
With a loud bow wow,
And thus the news he tells.
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 6