Classic Poem

Within me lay a little boy
 When I thought I was a man;
He was too poor to own a toy
 And many a toy would plan;
A mystic hole—some cellar once—
 Lay in his father's parsonage lot:
The fancy of this little dunce
 Built in the hole Aladdin's grot.

He saw a staircase there descend
 And he saw apartments rise—
Stone walls, bright halls, rooms for a friend
 And the maid with bashful eyes;
And Cinderella's steeds did browse
 In fancy on that pasture ridge,
And fancy dropped from fancy's house,
 A road down to the springlet's bridge.

All fairy things the urchin planned,
 But Aladdin's uncle's lamp,
Yet that alone was in his hand—
 The friendless little scamp:
Inquiry, wistfulness, desire,—
 To find what is in what but seems,—
The tinder wick to turn to fire
 The rusty lamp of golden dreams.

What is it yonder on the mount
 Like a palace that I see?—
After the forty years I count
 In the caverns of mystery?
A King's highway drops down the steep
 To a bridge across a brook,
And I see a child who walks in sleep
 Descend with a lamp and book:

It is my bridge below my dome,
 My road, my steeds, I spy;
The hole in the pasture is my home
 And the little boy is I.
Oh cruel uncle, leave me not
 Without my lamp's bright spark!—
Though I am king of the golden grot,
 I am poor if it is dark.