POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM

JOHN HENRY BONER

JOHN HENRY BONER (1845-1903), an American poet, was born in Salem, North Carolina. After receiving an academic education, he edited papers in Salem and in Asheville. He was reading clerk of the North Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1868, and chief clerk of the North Carolina House of Repre- 5 sentatives in 1869-1870. In 1887 he moved to New York. There he was on the staff of the Century Dictionary, the Library of American Literature, and the Standard Dictionary. He was also literary editor of the New York World and of the Literary Digest. The last years of his life were spent in the civil service in Washington. 10

Some of his poems have already taken their places in our best anthologies and, more significant than this, in the hearts of the people. - HENRY JEROME STOCKARD.

Here lived the soul enchanted

By melody of song;

Here dwelt the spirit haunted

By a demoniac throng;

Here sang the lips elated;

Here grief and death were sated;
Here loved and here unmated

Was he, so frail, so strong.

Here wintry winds and cheerless

The dying firelight blew

15

20

While he whose song was peerless

Dreamed the drear midnight through,

25

5

10

15

20

And from dull embers chilling
Crept shadows darkly filling
The silent place, and thrilling
His fancy as they grew.

Here, with brow bared to heaven,
In starry night he stood,
With the lost star of seven
Feeling sad brotherhood.
Here in the sobbing showers
Of dark autumnal hours

He heard suspected powers

Shriek through the stormy wood.

From visions of Apollo

And of Astarte's bliss,

He gazed into the hollow

And hopeless vale of Dis;

And though earth were surrounded
By heaven, it still was mounded
With graves. His soul had sounded
The dolorous abyss.

Proud, mad, but not defiant,

He touched at heaven and hell.

Fate found a rare soul pliant

And rung her changes well.

:

Alternately his lyre,

Stranded with strings of fire,
Led earth's most happy choir

Or flashed with Israfel.

No singer of old story

Luting accustomed lays,
No harper for new glory,

No mendicant for praise,

He struck high chords and splendid,
Wherein were fiercely blended

Tones that unfinished ended
With his unfinished days.

Here through this lowly portal,
Made sacred by his name,
Unheralded immortal

The mortal went and came.

And fate that then denied him,

And envy that decried him,

And malice that belied him,

Have cenotaphed his fame.

Apollo a Grecian god particularly interested in music and poetry. Astarte: a goddess of love and beauty. Dis : another name for Pluto, the god of the lower world. - dolorous: sorrowful. - abyss: a bottomless pit. -Israfel: the angel of music; also the name of one of Poe's poems. mendicant: beggar. cenotaphed made into a monument.

5

10

15

20

5

A MOTHER'S CARE

JOHN RUSKIN

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900), the most eloquent and original of English art critics, was born in London. His father, a wealthy wine merchant of considerable culture, gave his son every advantage of travel and education.

A year after his graduation from Oxford University, Ruskin wrote the first volume of his Modern Painters. In charming sentences he undertook to show that the later landscape painters, especially Turner, excelled the old masters. Other volumes were added to the first, and in these the critic examined many types of painting. In his books Ruskin is distinguished for his love of the beautiful in nature and in art, for his sympathy with the "toilers on sea and land," and for his teaching that the only true wealth is wealth of mind and soul. He spent a fortune in trying to improve man's bodily surroundings. He spent his life in an effort to uplift 15 the minds and hearts of men.

10

We scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential of all questions about a man, What patience had his mother or sister with him? And most men are apt to forget it themselves. 20 Pardon me for speaking of myself for a moment; if I did not know things by my own part in them, I would not write of them at all. You know that people sometimes call me a good writer; others like to hear me speak. Well, my own impression 25 about this power, such as it may be, is that it

was born with me, or gradually gained by my

own study. It is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise, by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of 5 the Bible besides, allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, 10 concerning the accent of the "of" in the lines

Shall any following spring revive

The ashes of the urn?

I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless 15 on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it, "The ashes of the urn." It was not, I say, till after three weeks' labor that my mother got the accent laid upon the "ashes" to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done 20 it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector, or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and had she done it wrongly, no afterstudy would ever have enabled me 25 to read so much as a single line of verse.