Home, Sweet Home

No one sings two verses of "Home, Sweet Home" which run as follows:

To us, in despite of the absence of years, How sweet the remembrance of home still appears!

From allurements abroad which but flatter the eye The unsatisfied heart turns and says with a sigh:

Home, home! Sweet, sweet home!

There's no place like home!

There's no place like home!

Your exile is blest with all fate can bestow--But mine has been chequer'd with many a woe! Yet though diff'rent our fortunes, our thoughts

are the same, And both, as we dream of Columbia, exclaim:

Home, home! Sweet, sweet home!

There's no place like home!

There's no place like home!

They are not sung because, until last week, they have never been published. But they are included in a manuscript copy of the song given to the Library of Congress last week by Leander McCor-mick-Goodhart, Commercial Secretary of the British Embassy.

Poet John Howard Payne wrote the extra verses in 1829 as a personal tribute to the "exile" of the verses--Lucretia Augusta Sturgis Bates, wife of Joshua Bates, famed London banker (Baring Bros.). Both Mr. and Mrs. Bates were natives of Massachusetts. He gave great gifts toward the founding of Boston Public Library. Their London years were cheered by opulence, popularity. But Poet Payne, who also spent most of his life away from his native U. S., was a homeless, often unhappy, expatriate, visited by the nostalgia which led him to write his famed song. When he met Mrs. Bates she asked him to inscribe the words in her autograph book. He did so, composed the two special stanzas, concluded: "I have added a few words more, addressed to you .... What this trifle wants in poetry you will do me the justice to believe is made up in truth." He died in Tunis.