Produced by A. Light and L. Bowser THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT by Edwin Arlington Robinson [Maine Poet -- 1869-1935.] 1905 printing of the 1897 edition [Note on text: Italicized stanzas have been indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases have been capitalized. Lines longer than 77 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors have been corrected.] To the Memory of my Father and Mother Contents: The Children of the Night Three Quatrains The World An Old Story Ballade of a Ship Ballade by the Fire Ballade of Broken Flutes Ballade of Dead Friends Her Eyes Two Men Villanelle of Change John Evereldown Luke Havergal The House on the Hill Richard Cory Two Octaves Calvary Dear Friends The Story of the Ashes and the Flame For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold Amaryllis Kosmos Zola The Pity of the Leaves Aaron Stark The Garden Cliff Klingenhagen Charles Carville's Eyes The Dead Village Boston Two Sonnets The Clerks Fleming Helphenstine For a Book by Thomas Hardy Thomas Hood The Miracle Horace to Leuconoe Reuben Bright The Altar The Tavern Sonnet George Crabbe Credo On the Night of a Friend's Wedding Sonnet Verlaine Sonnet Supremacy The Night Before Walt Whitman The Chorus of Old Men in "Aegeus" The Wilderness Octaves Two Quatrains Romance The Torrent L'Envoi The Children of the Night For those that never know the light, The darkness is a sullen thing; And they, the Children of the Night, Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing. But some are strong and some are weak, -- And there's the story. House and home Are shut from countless hearts that seek World-refuge that will never come. And if there be no other life, And if there be no other chance To weigh their sorrow and their strife Than in the scales of circumstance, 'T were better, ere the sun go down Upon the first day we embark, In life's imbittered sea to drown, Than sail forever in the dark. But if there be a soul on earth So blinded with its own misuse Of man's revealed, incessant worth, Or worn with anguish, that it views No light but for a mortal eye, No rest but of a mortal sleep, No God but in a prophet's lie, No faith for "honest doubt" to keep; If there be nothing, good or bad, But chaos for a soul to trust, -- God counts it for a soul gone mad, And if God be God, He is just. And if God be God, He is Love; And though the Dawn be still so dim, It shows us we have played enough With creeds that make a fiend of Him.