Relationships and Family

O Woman! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war, Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed; In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed; In halls, in gay attire is seen; In hamlets, dances on the green. Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below, and saints above; For love is heaven, and heaven is love.

The youth, who daily farther from the east At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore— The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The golden hours on angel wings Flew o’er me and my dearie; For dear to me as light and life Was my sweet Highland Mary.

She is a winsome wee thing, She is a handsome wee thing, She is a lo’esome wee thing,

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet To think how monie counsels sweet, How monie lengthened, sage advices, The husband frae the wife despises.

John Anderson my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bonie brow was brent; But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snaw, But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson my jo!

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Ae farewell and then forever!

But to see her was to love her, Love but her, and love forever. Had we never lov’d sae kindly, Had we never lov’d sae blindly, Never met—or never parted— We had ne’er been brokenhearted.

O, my Luve is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June. O, my Luve is like the melodie, That’s sweetly played in tune.

O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d, and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind.

Never seek to tell thy love Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears— Ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me A traveler came by Silently, invisibly— Oh, was no deny.

When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still.

When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry ’weep! ’weep! ’weep! ’weep! So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me.

How sweet I roam’d from field to field, And tasted all the summer’s pride, Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide!

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric ’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?