American Books

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... more...

The Path to HomeThere's the mother at the doorway, and the children at the gate,And the little parlor windows with the curtains white and straight.There are shaggy asters blooming in the bed that lines the fence,And the simplest of the blossoms seems of mighty consequence.Oh, there isn't any mansion underneath God's starry domeThat can rest a weary pilgrim like the little place called... 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... 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,... more...

OKLAHOMA. Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Land, O, land of the Fair God, Land where ancient, savage races Through barbarian ages trod! Through thy story fancy traces Facts above what fictions say, Where the world with haste advances,— Born are nations in a day! Where the wigwam stood so lonely, Lordly cities rise in might; Where spread desert wildness only, Fertile farms and homes delight. Thou hast summoned to... more...

PREFACE THIS volume is the first compilation of the recent experiments in Spectra. It is the aim of the Spectric group to push the possibilities of poetic expression into a new region,—to attain a fresh brilliance of impression by a method not so wholly different from the methods of Futurist Painting. An explanation of the term "Spectric" will indicate something of the nature of the technique... more...

PREFACE This little volume was written for no reason on earth and with no earthly reason. It just simply happened, on the principle, I suppose that "murder will out." Murder is a bad thing and so are nonsense rhymes. There is often a valid excuse for murder; there is none for nonsense rhymes. They seem to be a necessary evil to be classed with smallpox, chicken-pox, yellow fever and other... more...

TEXAS VOICE OF NEW ENGLAND. The five poems immediately following indicate the intense feeling of the friends of freedom in view of the annexation of Texas, with its vast territory sufficient, as was boasted, for six new slave States. Up the hillside, down the glen,Rouse the sleeping citizen;Summon out the might of men! Like a lion growling low,Like a night-storm rising slow,Like the tread of unseen... more...

This book contains the undesigned, but all the more spontaneous and authentic, biography of a very rare spirit. It contains the record of a short life, into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration—of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul—than it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length. Alan Seeger had barely passed his... more...

INTRODUCTION This syllabus, or finding-list, is offered to lovers of folk-literature in the hope that it may not be without interest and value to them for purposes of comparison and identification. It includes 333 items, exclusive of 114 variants, and embraces all popular songs that have so far come to hand as having been "learned by ear instead of by eye," as existing through oral... more...