with delight in him flushes,
And the silence of nightfall is music about him as soft as the
sleep that it hushes.
We awake with a sense of a sunrise that is not a gift of the
sundawn's giving,
And a voice that salutes us is sweeter than all sounds else in the
world of the living,
And a presence that warms us is brighter than all in the world of
our visions beholden,
Though the dreams of our sleep were as those that the light of a
world without grief makes golden.
For the best that the best of us ever devised as a likeness of
heaven and its glory,
What was it of old, or what is it and will be for ever, in song or
in story,
Or in shape or in colour of carven or painted resemblance, adored
of all ages,
But a vision recorded of children alive in the pictures of old or
the pages?
Where children are not, heaven is not, and heaven if they come not
again shall be never:
But the face and the voice of a child are assurance of heaven and
its promise for ever.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Studies in Song, A Century of
Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc, by Algernon Charles Swinburne

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN SONG ***

***** This file should be named 18782.txt or 18782.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/7/8/18782/

Produced by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may