Letty’s Home Is There
When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young, artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colored sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peeped
Between her baby fingers, her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leaped,
And laughed, and prattled in her world-wide bliss!
But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry:
“Oh, yes! I see it; Letty’s home is there!”
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair!
—Charles Tennyson Turner
Had I A Dozen Sons
Had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather eleven die nobly for their Country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.
—William Shakespeare.
Breathes There A Man With Soul So Dead
Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
—Walter Scott.
Alternate Reading: II Kings 5: 1-20.