To thee, I’ll return, overburdened with care;
The heart’s dearest solace will smile on me there;
No more from that cottage again will I roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
Home! home! &c.
The song was afterwards rewritten by its author, and introduced into an opera called Clari, the Maid of Milan, a play sold by him, in 1823, to Charles Kemble, of Covent Garden Theatre, for two hundred and fifty pounds; the music being composed by Sir Henry Bishop. In the opera, the song ran as we now know it:
’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere.