THE OLD SCHOOL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2647, 7 December 1904, Page 63

THE OLD SCHOOL.

Fare-well, old school! Your battered walls Have done with sighs and weeping; No more the teacher's strident calls Will rouse the_ infant sleeping. The brook that babbled past the door, Among the ferns and; rushes, Still flows, as in the days of yore, ' , In sportive leaps and gushes. To it the panting schoolboys run To cool them with its water, And splash each other in their fun, With peals of happy laughter. And on its banks a, band of girls, In varied ways reclining, With fingers deft 'amid their -curls The forest blooms are twining. And when the road near by is crossed, The streamlet joins the river; And in its darkling waves is lost For ever and for ever. Is that an image of man's lot? The grey-haired stranger muses; Not so, not so; avant the thoughtl That all our soul refuses. Far out above the oceaai -wide, The ardent sxm is beaming; And lifts each drop from out the tide, To bear it heavenward gleaming. There, purged and cleansed from worldly stain, And brighter forms assuming, Each falls anew to earth as ram, This life again resuming. The will of God doth Nature teach To him who seeketh knowledge; And not in crabbed Eastern speech, That must be learnt in college. No book-learned skill .-the ploughman needs, No Greek or Hebrew lore; The word divine, writ plain* he reads In brook and hill and flower. —X. Y. Z. December, 1904.