cottage (n.)
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn.
'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere.
An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gayly, that came at my call,
Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.
He passed a cottage with a double coach-house,—
A cottage of gentility;
And he owned with a grin,
That his favourite sin
Is pride that apes humility.
The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter,—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
He stood beside a cottage lone
And listened to a lute,
One summer's eve, when the breeze was gone,
And the nightingale was mute.
The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home:
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
I knew, by the smoke that so gracefully curl'd
Above the green elms, that a cottage was near;
And I said, "If there's peace to be found in the world,
A heart that was humble might hope for it here."
He passed a cottage with a double coach-house,—
A cottage of gentility;
And he owned with a grin,
That his favourite sin
Is pride that apes humility.
