Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading Selected from English and American Literature
Part 4
They followed from the snowy bank Those footmarks, one by one, Into the middle of the plank: And further there were none!
--Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child, That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.
POOR SUSAN.
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, There's a thrush that sings loud,--it has sung for three years; Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade,-- The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colors all have all passed away from her eyes.