Childhood

Oh, childhood is holy, a lily unstained
    From the garden of God;
Sweetly and lowly its sweetness is rained
    On the lowly earth-sod.
It comes from the Father, yet warm with the flow
    Of the great Mother’s heart,
And the wisest may gather the deepest they know
    From its life without art.
It sees in the glory of earth-crowning light
    A shadow of that
Which shot from the doorway, pursuing its flight
    Down the wind courses, flat,
When the hyacinth portal swung back at the call
    Of his kindred in clay;
For still the immortal can pierce the dun pall 
    To the fountain of day.
It hears, in the murmur of melodies rare,
    Memorial tones —
A vocal confirmer of visions too fair
    For our turbulent zones;
And low to his mother the little one croons
    Old snatches of song,
As aware to no other than th’ first starry tunes
    Her love-notes belong.
While odors ambrosial, that thrill like a thought 
    Down the channels of sense —
The speech of mute-social flower-lovers, o’er fraught
    With their meaning intense,
Bestir in the baby the feelings of bliss
    Which the nevershed blooms
First kindled, it may be, in worlds over this,
    With undying perfumes.
‘Tis therefore that dances his heart with a bound,
    To singing and shining,
And all the mute glances of beauty re-found;
    To fragrant untwining
Of mystic aromas, o’ercrowding the senses
    With life from these portals
Whence God, in their home, has sent fine influences
    Unmeasured to mortals.
In cottage and palace the same mellow sine
    Cometh down from the sun.
So love’s golden chalice pours out its red wine, 
    Ever partial to none
It is light-flashing childhood, this red wine of love,
    To the lowliest given,
And, kept undefiled, would glow brightly above, 
    In our love-feast with heaven.
That crystalline pureness, so fluid and clear,
    Of his beautiful soul —
What promise gives sureness his pilgrimage here,
    Yet afar from its goal —
Shall leave, to rely on, one beam of its light —
Like the thin aureole
On the white brow of Dian, unquenched by the night
    Of our earth’s vapor-roll?
Ah, woe for a spirit sent forth on its way
    By a passion unholy!
Pre-doomed to inherit, through channels of clay,
    Transgression and folly;
Prone weakly to grovel, by errors pre-natal;
    To stooping compelled
By the low-chambered hovel wherein, as by fatal 
    Constraint, he is held.
And woe for the father and mother by whom, 
    From the morning of birth,
That spirit must gather the vintage of doom
    Early sown in his earth.
And woe for the giving that garments his prime 
    In a sin-spotted vest,
From their silent loom’s weaving, impregnate by crime
    With the poison of pest!
To earth it were better they ne’er had been born, 
    If their regeneration
Broke not the old fetters, brought not the new morn
    Of her fairer creation,
When darkness and error take far their low flight,
    And no longer exist;
As the phantoms of terror, shot through by the light,
    Are dissolved with the mist.
Then, Childhood, I greet thee, and join the “All hail!” of
    Thy life-watchers holy;
Though shadows may meet thee with pangs in the vale of
    Transgression and folly.
Thou dream-Eden’s Real, though triumph in trial
    Attaining the true,
Thy spotless ideal, from loss and denial
    Thy life shall renew!