imagination on the part of the reader. This book aims to supply in some measure the means to the first requisite. The arrangement is, in the main, the pedagogical one-the easier selections at the beginning, and the more difficult ones towards the end of the book. Following the body of the book will be found biographical notes, in alphabetical order, of the authors represented, together with brief lists of their works most worthy to be read or studied. My grateful acknowledgments are hereby made to my colleagues, Professors Robert Allen Armstrong and John Harrington Cox, of the Department of English, and Dr. James Morton Callahan, of the Department of History, for valuable assistance; and to Dr. Charles William Kent, Professor of English Literature in the University of Virginia, for looking over the manuscript. W. B. WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, : December 1, 1908. CONTENTS. ...... TITLE AUTHOR PAGB Introduction......................Richard Gause Boone 7 The Charge of the Light Brigade....... Alfred Tennyson 11 The Gift of Empty Hands............ Sarah M. B. Piatt 18 The Star-Spangled Banner........... Francis Scott Key 23 To a Waterfowl.. .........William Cullen Bryant 27 The Reaper and the Flowers...... Henry W. Longfellow 34 Make Way for Liberty... ......James Montgomery 41 The Rising in 1776............. Thomas Buchanan Read 46 The Singing Lesson.. ....... ......Jean Ingelow Faithless Nelly Gray........... .... Thomas Hood 55 Burial of Sir John Moore................Charles Wolfe 58 The Burial of Moses...........Cecil Frances Alexander 61 - The American Flag ..............Joseph Rodman Drake 65 Old Ironsides...................Oliver Wendell Holmes 68 The Battle of Blenheim................ Columbus.................... .....Joaquin Miller 76 - Chicago: October 10, 1871.... ........Bret Harte 80 The Wreck of the Hesperus....... Henry W. Longfellow 81 -- King Solomon and the Ants....John Greenleaf Whittier 87 The Destruction of Sennacherib....George Gordon Byron 91 AUTEOB PAGD TITLE The Chambered Nautilus........Oliver Wendell Holmes 105 Wolsey's Farewell to Cromwell. ...William Shakespeare 108 The Rainy Day........... Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 113 In an Age of Fops and Toys......Ralph Waldo Emerson 115 O Captain! My Captain!...............Walt Whitman 116 Aladdin.......... .........James Russell Lowell 119 The Old Clock on the Stairs...... Henry W. Longfellow 122 The Four Winds.................Charles Henry Luders 126 The Birds of Killingworth. ....... Henry W. Longfellow 128 The Light of Other Days............... Thomas Moore 141 The Isle of Long Ago........ Benjamin Franklin Taylor 143 Recessional...........................Rudyard Kipling 146 The Ladder of St. Augustine......Henry W. Longfellow 149 Ichabod......... ......John Greenleaf Whittier 153 The Bugle Song...................... Alfred Tennyson 156 Where Lies the Land ?............. Arthur Hugh Clough 158 .......Ralph Waldo Emerson 159 The Finding of the Lyre...........James Russell Lowell 161 The Sands o' Dee.... ............Charles Kingsley 163 Abou ben Adhem....... .............Leigh Hunt 165 Excelsior................. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 170 The Isles of Greece...............George Gordon Byron 174 - On First Looking into Chapman's Homer....John Keats 180 INTRODUCTION By "learning to read,” as usually understood, is meant coming to know words and their surface meanings, and how to take the obvious import of simple sentènces. But one may have passed into the higher classes, so called, and into the secondary school even, or beyond, and yet be unable to "read” with an understanding or with an enriching content. To read means more than to interpret isolated words, or sentences, or even groups of sentences. It means the ability to take meaning from the printed page—but articulate meaning, the meaning of the whole through thinking together the meanings of the parts. If the parts are not interpreted, or are misinterpreted, the interpretation of the whole suffers. Longfellow's Rainy Day has a meaning as a whole, distinct from but arising from the ideas and pictures of the several stanzas and lines composing it. The first stanza of that poem furnishes a fairly complete picture, as does the second; but the meaning of neither is the meaning of the poem. In the third are summed up or converged the threads of suggestion in the other two. But even this would be incomplete, ineffective, without its setting in the materials of the first and second. To read the Rainy Day implies getting this articulate meaning; finding, beholding the composite picture, seeing and enjoying each part in terms of the whole. Moreover, both the understanding and the appreciation of the whole is enhanced by the content of meaning and beauty one is able to find in the parts; the clearness with which the picture elements and ideas take their places in the finished product; the quality and amount of experience one is able to converge upon the assembled words. To "read,” therefore, implies, further, somewhat of the dramatic sense, an educated faculty for marshalling details and significant elements, and picturesque situations, and their maneuvering to a common end of meaning. And the integrity of the whole is imperiled by any defect in the understanding of the parts making up the whole. One may take the meanings of all the words and every line in Rainy Day, and yet fail of the picture of the whole; but this is inevitably wanting without those meanings. Their threads make up the warp of the completed fabric. The woof, or filling, must be furnished out of the riches of one's own experience and understanding. To "read,” then, means the construction of mental pictures that shall be true to the materials used. All this implies, further, an element of joy in both getting and enriching the content of the text; a sense of pleasure in the creative and interpreting act; finding pleasure in the picture given or made, being able to domesticate it among one's own experiences. This is |