AN OLD HEART How young I am!  Ah! heaven, this curse of youth   Doth mock me from my mirror with great eyes,And pulsing veins repeat the unwelcome truth,   That I must live, though hope within me dies. So young, and yet I have had all of life.   Why, men have lived to see a hundred years,Who have not known the rapture, joy, and strife   Of my brief youth, its passion and its tears. Oh! what are... more...

When Day Is Done When day is done and the night slips down,And I've turned my back on the busy town,And come once more to the welcome gateWhere the roses nod and the children wait,I tell myself as I see them smileThat life is good and its tasks worth while. When day is done and I've come once moreTo my quiet street and the friendly door,Where the Mother reigns and the children playAnd the kettle sings in the old-time way,I throw my coat on a... more...

INTRODUCTION. "Norman's Woe" is the picturesque name of a rocky headland, reef, and islet on the coast of Massachusetts, between Gloucester and Magnolia. The special disaster in which the name originated had long been lost from memory when the poet Longfellow chose the spot as a background for his description of the "Wreck of the Hesperus," and gave it an association that it will scarcely lose while the English language endures. Nor does it... more...

  The Song of Hiawatha is based on the legends and stories of many North American Indian tribes, but especially those of the Ojibway Indians of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. They were collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the reknowned historian, pioneer explorer, and geologist. He was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Schoolcraft married Jane, O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (The Woman of the... more...

MEMOIR. Frederick William Thomas was the oldest child of E. S. Thomas and Anna his wife. He was born at Providence Rhode Island, but spent his earlier years at Charleston South Carolina, where Mr. E. S. Thomas resided and edited and published the Charleston City Gazette. While Frederick William was still young, Mr. Thomas removed to Baltimore Maryland, and there his son was educated and brought up to the profession of the law. Being... more...

I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author's race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would... more...

EDWARD L. BERNAYS ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN He was a burly Dutch tenor,And I patiently trailed him in his waking and sleeping hoursThat I might not lose a story,—But his life was commonplace and unimaginative—Air raids and abdications kept his activities,(A game of bridge yesterday, a ride to Tarrytown),Out of the papers.I watchfully waited,Yearning a coup that would place him on theMusical map.A coup, such as kissing a Marshal... more...

THE WAYSIDE INN. One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,Across the meadows bare and brown,The windows of the wayside innGleamed red with fire-light through the leavesOf woodbine, hanging from the eavesTheir crimson curtains rent and thin. As ancient is this hostelryAs any in the land may be,Built in the old Colonial day,When men lived in a grander way,With ampler hospitality;A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,Now somewhat fallen to decay,With... more...

PREFACE In March, 1914, a volume appeared entitled "Des Imagistes." It was a collection of the work of various young poets, presented together as a school. This school has been widely discussed by those interested in new movements in the arts, and has already become a household word. Differences of taste and judgment, however, have arisen among the contributors to that book; growing tendencies are forcing them along different paths. Those of us... more...

AS CREATED There's a space for good to bloom inEvery heart of man or woman,—And however wild or human,Or however brimmed with gall,Never heart may beat without it;And the darkest heart to doubt itHas something good about itAfter all.   WHERE-AWAY O the Lands of Where-Away!Tell us—tell us—where are they?Through the darkness and the dawnWe have journeyed on and on—From the cradle to the cross—From... more...