O'er the fields with heavy tread,

Light of heart, and high of head,

Though the halting steps be labored, slow, and weary;
Still the spirits brave and strong

Find a comforter in song,

And their corn-song rises ever loud and cheery.

Oh, we hoe de co'n

Since de ehly mo'n;
Now de sinkin' sun

Says de day is done.

And a tear is in the eye

Of the master sitting by,

As he listens to the echoes low-replying,
To the music's fading calls,

As it faints away and falls

Into silence, deep within the cabin dying.

Oh, we hoe de co'n

Since de ehly mo'n;

Now de sinkin' sun
Says de day is done.

17. Josephine Preston Peabody Marks (1874- ), formerly an instructor at Wellesley College, has written many poems and dramas. Her play The Piper won the Stratfordon-Avon prize in 1910 and has been successfully staged both in England and America. (See Bibliography, page 441, for suggested readings.)

18. Percy MacKaye (1875- ), a graduate of Harvard, is a talented writer of poetic dramas. Several of these have been successfully staged, as The Canterbury Pilgrims, Jeanne D'Arc, and The Scarecrow. A Garland to Sylvia is a fanciful reverie in dramatic form quite unique in its way. His latest poem, School, is one of his finest poems.

(From Ode on the Centenary of Abraham Lincoln, 1909. Delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York, February, 1909.)

VII

"To sleep, perchance to dream!"—No player, rapt
In conscious art's soliloquy, might know
To subtilize the poignant sense so apt
As he, almost in shadow of the end,
Murmured its latent sadness to a friend;
And then he said to him: "Ten nights ago
I watched alone; the hour was very late;
I fell asleep and dreamed;

And in my dreaming, all

The White House lay in deathlike stillness round,
But soon a sobbing sound,

Subdued, I heard, as of innumerable

Mourners. I rose and went from room to room;

No living being there was visible;

Yet as I passed, unspeakably it seemed

They sobbed again, subdued. In every room
Light was, and all things were familiar:

But who were those once more

Whose hearts were breaking there? What heavy gloom Wrapt their dumb grieving? Last, the East-room door I opened, and it lay before me: High

And cold on solemn catafalque it lay,

Draped in funereal vestments, and near by

Mute soldiers guarded it. In black array,

A throng of varied race

Stood weeping,

Or gazing on the covered face.

Then to a soldier: 'Who is dead

In the White House?' I asked. He said:

'The President.'

And a great moan that through the people went
Waked me from sleeping."

VIII

It was a dream! for that which fell in death,
Seared by the assassin's lightning, and there lay
A spectacle for anguish was a wraith;
The real immortal Lincoln went his way
Back to his only home and native heath-
The common people's common heart.

XII

Leave then, that wonted grief

Which honorably mourns its martyred dead,
And newly hail instead

The birth of him, our hardy shepherd chief,
Who by green paths, of old democracy
Leads still his tribes to uplands of glad peace.

As long as out of blood and passion blind-
Springs the pure justice of the reasoning mind,
And justice, bending, scorns not to obey
Pity, that once in a poor manger lay,
As long as, thralled by time's imperious will,
Brother hath bitter need of brother, still
His presence shall not cease

To lift the ages toward his human excellence,

And races yet to be

Shall in a rude hut do him reverence

And solemnize a simple man's nativity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOR FURTHER ILLUSTRATION

Bunner, H. C.: Candor. (From Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere.) October. (From Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere.)

A Wood. (From Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere.)

The Nice People. (In Short Sixes.)

The Love Letters of Smith. (In Short Sixes). Carleton, W.: Out of the Old House, Nancy.

Field, E.: The Little Book of Western Verse.

Gilder, R. W.: The Life Mask of Abraham Lincoln.

The Cello.

MacKaye, P.: A Garland to Sylvia. School. (In The Forum, October

1913.)

Jeanne d'Arc.

Marks, J. P. Peabody: The Singing Leaves.

(Selected Poems.)

A Book of Songs and Spells. (Selected Poems.)

The Piper. (A drama.)

Miller, Joaquin: That Gentleman from Boston. (In Complete Poetical Works.)

An Idyl of Oregon. (In Complete Poetical Works.)

Moody, W. V.: The Great Divide. (A drama.)

The Faith Healer. (A drama.)

Riley, J. W.: When the Frost is on the Pumpkin. (In Neighborly Poems.)

An Old Played Out Song. (In Neighborly Poems.)

Stedman, E. C.: Pan in Wall Street.

Helen Keller.

The Diamond Wedding.

CHAPTER VI

TENDENCIES

I. The American Magazine

A glance backward and a view of the present reveal two striking features in the literary history of America, the modern magazine and the short story. Our literary efforts have crystallized about these two; they are distinctively American. The magazine, indeed, holds a unique place in the history of our literature. From the beginning it has discovered talent to the world; it has created a reading public for many of our great writers. Thus, Halleck's Marco Bozzaris and Bryant's Death of the Flowers were first published in the New York Review; Bryant's Thanatopsis and To a Water Fowl appeared in the North American Review; Poe's Raven was first published in the New York Mirror; Longfellow's Psalm of Life came out in the Knickerbocker Magazine; Holmes's first two instalments of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table were published in the New England Magazine, the later ones in the Atlantic Monthly; Whitman's first literary success, Death in a School-Room, came out in the Democratic Review; Lowell's earlier series of Biglow Papers was published in the Boston Courier; E. E. Hale's The Man Without a Country in the Atlantic Monthly; W. D. Howells's Venetian Life in the Boston Advertiser. And these are but a few instances.

The editorial history of American magazines discloses the following facts. Franklin, in 1741, published the General Magazine, which ran for six months. Charles Brock