Envoy for "A Child's Garden of Verses"

WHETHER upon the garden seatYou lounge with your uplifted feetUnder the May's whole Heaven of blue;Or whether on the sofa you,No grown up person being by,5Do some soft corner occupy;Take you this volume in your handsAnd enter into other lands,For lo! (as children feign) supposeYou, hunting in the garden rows,10Or in the lumbered attic, orThe cellar - a nail-studded doorAnd dark, descending stairway foundThat led to kingdoms underground:There standing, you should hear with ease15Strange birds a-singing, or the treesSwing in big robber woods, or bellsOn many fairy citadels:

There passing through (a step or so -Neither mamma nor nurse need know!)20From your nice nurseries you would pass,Like Alice through the Looking-GlassOr Gerda following Little Ray,To wondrous countries far away.Well, and just so this volume can25Transport each little maid or manPresto from where they live awayWhere other children used to play.As from the house your mother seesYou playing round the garden trees,30So you may see if you but lookThrough the windows of this bookAnother child far, far awayAnd in another garden play.But do not think you can at all,35By knocking on the window, callThat child to hear you. He intentIs still on his play-business bent.He does not hear, he will not look,Nor yet be lured out of this book.40For long ago, the truth to say,He has grown up and gone away;And it is but a child of airThat lingers in the garden there.