At eve the babes with angels converse hold,
While we to our strange pleasures wend our way,
Each with its little face upraised to heaven,
With folded hands, barefoot kneels down to pray,
At selfsame hour with selfsame words they call
On God, the common Father of us all.
And then they sleep, the golden dreams anon,
Born as the busy day's last murmurs die,
In swarms tumultuous flitting through the gloom,
Their breathing lips and golden locks descry,
And as the bees o'er bright flowers joyous roam,
Around their clustered cradles clustering come.
Oh, prayer of childhood! simple, innocent;
Oh, infant slumbers! peaceful, pure and light;
Oh, happy worship! ever gay with smiles,
Meet prelude to the harmonies of night;
As birds beneath the wing enfold their head,
Nestled in prayer the infant seeks its bed.
CHAPTER III
LURAY CAVERNS AND MAMMOTH CAVE
O! bear me then to vast embowering shades,
To twilight groves and visionary vales,
To weeping grottoes and prophetic glooms,
Where angel forms, athwart the solemn dusk
Tremendous, sweep, or seem to sweep, along,
And voices more than man through the void,
Deep sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear.
Or is this gloom too much?
Where creeping water ooze, and where rivers wind,
Cluster the rolling fogs and swim along
The dusky mantled lawns.
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