Relationships and Family

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?

And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand! no wiser than before. 10

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, is—to die.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, 5 And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away?

Where’er I roam, whatever realms to see, My heart untravel’d fondly turns to thee; Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain, And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.

O’er her warm cheek and rising bosom move The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care.

I’ve often wish’d that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend, A river at my garden’s end, A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.

Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time, And make two lovers happy.

“Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed” was the ninth beatitude.

Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside, A teeming mistress, but a barren bride.

Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air In his own ground.

Man may escape from rope and gun; Nay, some have outliv’d the doctor’s pill: Who takes a woman must be undone, That basilisk is sure to kill. The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets, So he that tastes woman, woman, woman, He that tastes woman, ruin meets.

Youth’s the season made for joys, Love is then our duty.

If with me you’d fondly stray. Over the hills and far away. 2

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

T’ abhor the makers, and their laws approve, Is to hate traitors and the treason love.