RECOLECTIONS OF HOME
1
When we stray far away from the old pleasant village
We love it the fonder the further away
The sweet pleasant songs of ploughmen oer their tillage
Are more pleasant sounds than the strange calls to day
That sweet little homestead with pollard ash and pond
Leads back a hundred miles wherever I may roam
A dove cotes wooden home where the pigeons coo so fond
Soon brings to my eye my own at the old house at home
2
The very layer of crab that's wattled in the hedge
The old post in its red paint crushed with waggons rushing through
The teazles prickly burrs or the little hubs of sedge
Will bring me to the old place where I lived a moon ago
But the flowers here they tell me in their brown, red, white & blue
That their sisters are now in the fields around my house at home
Though the sun here shines as bright, and as christal be the dew
They are not so sweet as those flowers that in our meadows grew
3
A mossy plank across the flood though weedy be the dyke
Here fifty miles away and I cross another stream
It brings me to my own fields the brigs so very like
So here I only wander in the middle of a dream
At home I did right cozie and lived as I would choose
And saw nothing but my sweet fields day after day
'Till I was forced to flee my corner and the muse
As the linnet from its nest by the awk is drove away
4
I always see a bit of home in every likely thing
A white-thorn hedge, or bramble bush or pollard willow tree
Brings me my own snug homestead, and the budding of the spring
[OMITTED]
