Dedicated

To all who teach

Foreword.

Poetry is the highest means of developing the religious sentiment. "Its sole aim is to keep open the great highway which leads from the seen to the unseen." The poet sees beyond the ordinary vision : he reaches the heights and depths of feeling. He reports what he sees and feels in word-pictures charged with emotional power.

The wise teacher, in the home, the school, the church, or wheresoever circumstanced, recognizing the disposition of the growing mind to receive suggestion, selects choice poems for memory-teaching, and early in life implants the ideals of conduct appropriate to noble youth and manhood.

This book of verse has been compiled to bring together, in convenient and attractive form, many poems and parts of poems for memory-teaching. Fifty familiar hymns, rich in thought and sentiment and universal in acceptance, have been included.

It is hoped that many of the single stanzas may be used by the family at breakfast, when, after the separation of sleep, the members come together in the light of a new day. A beautiful custom is the joining of hands about the table, and the reciting of an appropriate stanza, followed by a brief thanksgiving. Those who have awakened to this symbolism in childhood are free from the excess of consciousness which hinders family devotion. A simple quotation

in a foreign tongue may prove a help to those who miss the ease of unconscious childhood :

"Back of the loaf is the snowy flour,

And back of the flour, the mill;

And back of the mill is the wheat, and the shower,
And the sun, and the Father's will."

"Alle guten Gaben,'

Alles was wir haben,

Kommt, O Gott, von Dir;

Dank sei Dir dafür."

Other appropriate stanzas for this same purpose may be readily chosen :

"He prayeth best who loveth best" (p. 65);
"If I can stop one heart from breaking" (p. 33);
"I said it on the hillside path" (p. 16);

"It matters little where I was born" (p. 31);

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"O gift of God! O perfect day!" (p. 49), etc.

The poems have been grouped under twenty heads, with the thought of impressing the ideals suggested. The needs of varying ages have been considered, with the hope of making the book generally acceptable.

Many a favorite poem and author will be missed, for no attempt has been made to present a complete anthology. With the abundance of material, limits were imperative. The choice has been guided by the aim to unite poetical beauty with teaching power.

"Gold? Said I gold? —ay then, why he, or she,
Or whosoe'er it was, or half the world,

Had ventured,—had the thing I spake of been
Mere gold."

CROFTSMERE, September, 1903.

C. B. B.