PIPES O' PAN AT ZEKESBURY   The pipes of Pan! Not idler now are they  Than when their cunning fashioner first blew  The pith of music from them: Yet for you  And me their notes are blown in many a way  Lost in our murmurings for that old day  That fared so well, without us.—Waken to  The pipings here at hand:—The clear halloo  Of truant-voices, and the roundelay  The waters... more...

ATHALIA HALL stopped to get her breath and look back over the road climbing steeply up from the covered bridge. It was a little after five, and the delicate air of dawn was full of wood and pasture scents—the sweetness of bay and the freshness of dew-drenched leaves. In the valley night still hung like gauze under the trees, but the top of the hill was glittering with sunshine. "Why, we've... more...

Richard's Mother.The great quarrel between the houses of York and Lancaster.Terrible results of the quarrel.Origin of it.The mother of King Richard the Third was a beautiful, and, in many respects, a noble-minded woman, though she lived in very rude, turbulent, and trying times. She was born, so to speak, into one of the most widely-extended, the most bitter, and the most fatal of the family... more...

HISTORICAL NOTE. The design followed out in the succeeding poem has been to touch upon the leading historical incidents of Saul's career that lead up to and explain his tragic death on Mount Gilboa. With him, nearly 3,000 years ago, commenced the Monarchical government of the Israelites, who had previously been governed by a Theocracy. The Prophet Samuel, who anointed Saul, was the last of the... more...

THE FIRST CHAPTER I If you were to say to an Ulster man, "Who are the proudest people in Ireland?" he would first of all stare at you as if he had difficulty in believing that any intelligent person could ask a question with so obvious an answer, and then he would reply, "Why, the Ulster people, of course!" And if you were to say to a Ballyards man, "Who are the proudest people in... more...

CHAPTER I NATURE OF RELIGION 1. It appears probable that primitive men endowed with their own qualities every seemingly active object in the world. Experience forced them to take note of the relations of all objects to themselves and to one another. The knowledge of the sequences of phenomena, so far as the latter are not regarded as acting intentionally on him, constitutes man's science and... more...

As his boat shot to the camp dock of beach stones, the camper thought he heard a child's voice behind the screen of brush. He leaped out and drew the boat to its landing upon a cross-piece held by two uprights in the water, and ascended the steep path worn in leaf mould. There was not only a child, there was a woman also in the camp. And Frank Puttany, his German feet planted outward in a line,... more...

"There," said Tâvita the teacher, pointing with his paddle to a long, narrow peninsula which stretched out into the shallow waters of the lagoon, "there, that is the place where the battle was fought. In those days a village of thirty houses or more stood there; now no one liveth there, and only sometimes do the people come here to gather cocoanuts." The White Man nodded.... more...

I have been all my life a sort of amphibious animal, having, like many an old Roman, learned to swim long before I had learned to read. The bounding backs of the billows were my only rocking-horse when I was a child, and dearly I loved to ride them when a fresh breeze was blowing. I rarely tired in the water, where I often amused myself for hours together. I grew up with such a liking for the exercise,... more...

PROLOGUE. A Castle in Normandy. Interior of the Hall. Roofs of a City seen thro' Windows. HENRY and BECKET at chess. HENRY.So then our good Archbishop TheobaldLies dying. BECKET.I am grieved to know as much. HENRY.But we must have a mightier man than heFor his successor. BECKET.                   Have you thought of one? HENRY.A cleric lately poison'd his own mother,And... more...