The Dying Year.

A poem by Eugene Field

The year has been a tedious one--
A weary round of toil and sorrow,
And, since it now at last is gone,
We say farewell and hail the morrow.

Yet o'er the wreck which time has wrought
A sweet, consoling ray is shimmered--
The one but compensating thought
That literary life has glimmered.

Struggling with hunger and with cold
The world contemptuously beheld 'er;
The little thing was one year old--
But who'd have cared had she been elder?