A CHILD'S PITY

No sweeter thing than children's ways and wiles,

Surely, we say, can gladden eyes and ears:

Yet sometime sweeter than their words or smiles

Are even their tears.

To one for once a piteous tale was read,

How, when the murderous mother crocodile

Was slain, her fierce brood famished, and lay dead,

Starved, by the Nile.

In vast green reed-beds on the vast grey slime

Those monsters motherless and helpless lay,

Perishing only for the parent's crime

Whose seed were they.

Hours after, toward the dusk, our blithe small bird

Of Paradise, who has our hearts in keeping,

Was heard or seen, but hardly seen or heard,

For pity weeping.

He was so sorry, sitting still apart,

For the poor little crocodiles, he said.

Six years had given him, for an angel's heart,

A child's instead.

Feigned tears the false beasts shed for murderous ends,

We know from travellers’ tales of crocodiles:

But these tears wept upon them of my friend's

Outshine his smiles.

What heavenliest angels of what heavenly city

Could match the heavenly heart in children here?

The heart that hallowing all things with its pity

Casts out all fear?

So lovely, so divine, so dear their laughter

Seems to us, we know not what could be more dear:

But lovelier yet we see the sign thereafter

Of such a tear.

With sense of love half laughing and half weeping

We met your tears, our small sweet-spirited friend:

Let your love have us in its heavenly keeping

To life's last end.