While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

And to teach
by his own
example,
love and
reverence to
all things that
God made
and loveth.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

"Tis strange, he spake of you familiarly,

As mine and Albert's common Foster-Mother.

FOSTER-MOTHER.

Now blessings on the man, whoe'er he be,

That joined your names with mine! O my sweet lady! As often as I think of those dear times,

When you two little-ones would stand at eve

On each side of my chair, and make me learn
All

you had learnt in the day, and how to talk In gentle phrase, then bid me sing to you

'Tis more like heaven to come than what has been.

MARIA.

O my dear Mother! this strange man has left me

Troubled with wilder fancies, than the Moon
Breeds in the love-sick maid who gazes at it,
Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye

She gazes idly-But that entrance, Mother!—

FOSTER-MOTHER.

Can no one hear. It is a perilous tale!

No one?

MARIA.

FOSTER-MOTHER.

My husband's father told it me,

Poor old Leoni: Angels, rest his soul!

He was a woodman, and could fell, and saw,

With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam
Which props the hanging-wall of the old chapel?--
Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree,
He found a baby, wrapt in mosses lined

With thistle-beards, and such small locks of wool
As hang on brambles. Well, he brought him home,
And reared him at the then Lord Valez' cost;

And so the babe grew up a pretty boy→→→

A pretty boy, but most unteachable

And never learnt a prayer nor told a bead;

But knew the names of birds, and mocked their notes,

And whistled, as he were a bird himself!

And all the autumn 'twas his only play

To gather seeds of wild-flowers, and to plant them
With earth and water on the stumps of trees.

A Friar, who oft cull'd simples in the wood,
A grey-haired man-he loved this little boy:

The boy loved him-and, when the Friar taught him,
He soon could write with the pen; and from that time
Lived chiefly at the Convent or the Castle.

So he became a very learned youth.

But oh! poor wretch! he read, and read, and read,
Till his brain turned-and ere his twentieth year,

He had unlawful thoughts of many things:
And though he prayed, he never loved to pray
With holy men, or in a holy place ;-

But yet his speech, it was so soft and sweet,
The late Lord Valez ne'er was wearied with him :

And once, as by the north side of the chapel
They stood together, chained in deep discourse,
The earth heaved under them with such a groan,

That the wall tottered, and had well nigh fallen
Right on their heads. My Lord was sorely frightened;