H. Y. J. T.
[A BALLAD, illustrating how a poor girl (from an association of ideas) was suddenly arrested in a life of sin by hearing
a cobbler's blackbird sing from the upper storey of a dilapidated house in a miserable street in London, and was affected
by such a deep sense of repentance that she was induced to return immediately to her mother's house, in a village in
Gloucestershire, where she lived for many years, and led a most useful and exemplary life.]
Within a dark and dirty street,
Beside a gin-shop door,
There stood a wretched, wretched girl,
With Jack, just come ashore.
The lass was dressed in yellow silk,
In green, and red, and blue;
O she was dressed in every shade
That had a rainbow hue.
And in that dark and narrow street
The sunshine seldom came;
For what was there for it to gild
But squalid want and shame!
One house alone there was, which like
A giant raised its head
Above the crumbling chimney pots
And bricks so brown and red.
And in the highest, lightest room,
Above the nether din,
A busy cobbler lived, and worked
For those who lived by sin.
The sun shone never on the town,
Its spires, and domes, and towers;
But oft would send its beams across
To gild his garret flowers.
His was the only, tiny room,
In that dark lane so small,
In which the sunbeams ever came
To dance upon the wall.
The-cobbler oped his window wide,
And hung his blackbird out;
And when the sun began to gleam,
The bird began to shout.
The sun illumed its tiny eye,
Which seem'd a fiery bead
It hopp'd upon its highest perch,
And tuned its golden reed.
And while the sailor showed the lass
A pretty golden ring;
And while she kissed him for the gift
The bird began to sing.
She sat outside the gin-shop door,
And listened to the bird;
It seemed to tell a happy tale,
In childhood she had heard.
Jack heard the harp and tamborine;
He called her to the dance;
But there she sat and listened till
He thought her in a trance.
That bird brought home to memory
The visions of her youth;
She thought upon the happy days
Of innocence and truth.
It brought to mind her Master's voice,
Who wrote upon the floor
Who to the erring woman said--
"Go thou and sin no more."
Before her eyes appear'd to pass
Her native village scene ;
Its groves and brooks, its fields' and flowers,
The church upon the green.
She thought she heard the village bells
Salute the Sabbath morn;
She thought she heard the soaring lark
Sing o fer the fields of corn.
She seemed to see her mother's cot,
With ivy trailing o'er;
She seemed to smell the fragrant herbs
That grew beside the door.
She seemed to hear her father's voice
Bead from the good old Book,
While she sat, on a summer's eve,
Within a bosky nook.
She seemed to hear her mother's voice,
When at her feet she knelt;
Her eyes began to fill with tears,
Her heart began to melt.
Her scalding tears fell like the rain,
Her heart was beating fast;
Before her fever'd vision floats
The future and the past.
"O, do not weep, the sailor cried,
Come have a glass of gin.
"No, no! lam resolved, she cried,
"To quit this life of sin."
Jack heard the fiddle and the harp,
He wished to get away ;
She cried, " Oh, stop awhile, and hear
That blackbird's happy lay."
"Its voice appears to call to mind
When I was pure and good;
When going to the Sabbath school
I heard it in the wood.
"That blackbird is a preacher, Jack,
Whose words I understand;
My father's spirit seems to rise
And pull me by the hand.
M That blackbird, Jack, has starred my heart,
And pierced it like a knife,
And Fm resolved to sin no more,
But lead a better life.
"I long to see my mother Jack,
For with a cruel blow,
1 turned her flowing raven hair
As white as drifted snow.
"And I'm resolved to seek my home
Before my mother dies,
That she may see me penitent
Before her closing eyes."
She tore the flowers from her hair.
And flung them in the street;
She pulled the jewels from her neck,
And crushed them with her feet.
She travelled many a weary mile
Along the dusty road,
Until she reached, with bleeding feet,
Her mother's dear abode.
Ko tongue can tell how full of joy
Her aged mother felt,
When at the bed, a penitent,
Her weeping daughter knelt.
She nursed her aged mother dear,
And worked to earn her bread,
And gently clos'd her eyes in death,
And laid her with the dead.
Before she breathed her latest breath,
She said, and sweetly smiled,
"God bless that pretty blackbird voice,
Whose song restored my child."
Her daughter lived for many years,
And led a holy life;
And was an angel in the house
Of every sick man's wife.
She sew*d, she nurs'd, she read, and prayed,
And raised the dying head
And watched throughout the long, lone night,
Beside the sick child's bed.
And if you search all Gloucestershire,
And every village round,
A nobler, purer, better soul,
There never could be found.
At last consumption seized her frame,--
What griefs the poor o'erwhelm ;
They placed her 'neath the churchyard turf,
Beside a stately elm.
And there a blackbird sits and sings,
Upon its highest spray,
On ev*ry springtide closing eve,
And every dawning day.
The aged pastor of the church,
Who laid her down to rest,
With heaving breast and tearful eyes,
His people thus addressed :-
"Full many flowers of fairest form
Bough blasts have crushed and hurt;
We might restore, if we would stoop,
And raise them from the dirt.
In every soul there is some good
Lies latent in the dark,
If men would only take the pains
To fan the vital spark."
O erring sisters, come away
From haunts of death and sin,
For heaven's gate is open still,
And you may enter in.
In heaven's glades, so rich and fair,
There are no rich nor poor;
But all who love their God and Christ
Can find an open door.
Upon St. Leonards.
Notes
From the Brisbane Newspaper The Queenslander 10 Aug 1867 Page 3.
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