We looked into the pit prepared to take her:

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Was no room for any work in the close clay! From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her

Crying, 'Get up, little Alice! it is day.' If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower, With your ear down, little Alice never cries; Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,

For a smile has time for growing in her eyes: And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in The shroud by the kirk-chime. 50

It is good when it happens," say the children, "That we die before our time."

Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him, Hears our weeping any more?

"Two words, indeed, of praying we remember; And at midnight's hour of harm, 'Our Father,' looking upward in the chamber, We say softly for a charm.

We know no other words, except 'Our Father,' And we think that, in some pause of angels' song,

God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,

And hold both within His right hand which is strong.

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'Our Father!' If He heard us, He would surely (For they call Him good and mild) Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, 'Come and rest with me, my child.'

"But no!" say the children, weeping faster, "He is speechless as a stone:

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river?

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river,
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!),

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes as he sat by the river.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan,

(Laughed while he sat by the river) "The only way since gods began

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