241
A False Step 246
Void in Law 248
Lord Walter's Wife 252
Bianca among the Nightingales 259
My Kate 267
A Song for the Ragged Schools of London 270
May's Love 279
Amy's Cruelty 280
My Heart and I 284
The Best Thing in the World 287
Where's Agnes? 288

POEMS

A CHILD'S GRAVE AT FLORENCE.

A.A.E.C.

Born, July 1848. Died, November 1849

I.

Of English blood, of Tuscan birth,
What country should we give her?
Instead of any on the earth,
The civic Heavens receive her.

II.

And here among the English tombs
In Tuscan ground we lay her,
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes
Our English words of prayer.

III.

A little child!--how long she lived,
By months, not years, is reckoned:
Born in one July, she survived
Alone to see a second.

IV.

Bright-featured, as the July sun
Her little face still played in,
And splendours, with her birth begun,
Had had no time for fading.

V.

So, LILY, from those July hours,
No wonder we should call her;
She looked such kinship to the flowers,--
Was but a little taller.

VI.

A Tuscan Lily,--only white,
As Dante, in abhorrence
Of red corruption, wished aright
The lilies of his Florence.

VII.

We could not wish her whiter,--her
Who perfumed with pure blossom
The house--a lovely thing to wear
Upon a mother's bosom!

VIII.

This July creature thought perhaps
Our speech not worth assuming;
She sat upon her parents' laps
And mimicked the gnat's humming;

IX.

Said "father," "mother"--then left off,
For tongues celestial, fitter:
Her hair had grown just long enough
To catch heaven's jasper-glitter.

X.

Babes! Love could always hear and see
Behind the cloud that hid them.
"Let little children come to Me,
And do not thou forbid them."

XI.

So, unforbidd