While thou wert on the rolling deep,
Toss’d by the rugged sea,
My only comfort was to weep—
To weep and pray for thee.
Over thy follies I have shed,
Ah! many a bitter tear,
And I have mourn’d for thee as dead
Through all the passing year;
Yet I have pray’d that thou, my son,
Might’st catch my latest breath,
That thy dear hands, and thine alone,
Might close my eyes in death.
I do forgive thee now, my boy,
It frees my heart from pain,
My bosom throbs alone with joy
To see thy face again.
Though thou hast wander’d far from me,
I’ll yet forgive the past,
For I am happy, boy, to see
Thou hast return’d at last.
Yes, now this heart is fill’d with joy,
My sororws are all o’er,
For thou art here again, my boy,
And we shall part no more.
My Home in Kentuck.
I long, how I long for my home in Kentuck,
With its fields where I labor’d, so green,
Where the possum and the coon, and the juicy wild duck,
And the ’bacco so prime, I have seen:
There I’ve fish’d from the banks of the Masella creek,
And oft, in the shades of the night,
Have I watch’d with my gun, nigh the old Salt Lick,
For the game as it come to my sight.
Chorus.—There is my old cabin home,
There are my sisters and brother,
There is my wife, joy of my life,
My child, and the grave of my mother.
That hut, my dear home, my log-cabin home,
With the bench that I stood at the door,
Where weary at night, from my work I would come
And there rest, ere I stepp’d on its floor.
The calabash vine, that then clung to its walls,
Oh! ’tis dear in my memory still to me,
And my master, who lives in his own handsome halls,
Not so happy as then I could be.
Chorus.—There is my old cabin home, &c.
But that cabin is far, far away from me now,
I am far from the scenes that I love,
Far away from that wife who once heard me vow
That forever I faithful would prove—
My friends are still there, and still there is my child,
And still there, all in life, I must crave—
Still there is that mound, with its flowers so wild,
That covers my old mother’s grave,