And though you be done to the death, what then? If you battled the best you could, Why, the Critic will call it good. And whether he's slow or spry, Edmund Vance Cooke. ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Address of President Lincoln at Gettysburg, Nov. 19, 1863 IF WE HAD THE TIME If I had the time to find a place If I had the time! If I had the time! Richard Burton MAMMA'S DIRL Ev'ry night when shadows fly, And the housework is put by, And, shut-eyed, I sit and dream Of the light on some far stream, Of the blooms I used to know In some field of long ago, Then I wonder wearily If the present holds for me Half the joys of other days, Half the gladness of old ways, And sometimes my eyes are wet With a half-forgot regret; Then comes romping in to me And up-clambers on my knee Such a blue-eyed, laughing sprite, And puts weariness to flight; Such as makes the present seem, More than yesterday, a dream Of sweet things; and so I smile O'er regrets of otherwhile, And she says, and twists a curl: "I am mamma's baby dirl!" And the while I bless my lot, Whispers: “Mamma had fordot?" I had not forgot, ah, no! Memory will sometime go Down the ways we used to tread; Ways with wondrous blossoms spread It is not that we regret, These old ways we don't forget, It is just that laughter rang, just that lilting wild birds sang O'er those ways of yesteryear J. M. Lewis, in Houston Post. JOHN WESLEY'S RULE Do all the good you can, THE SIMPLE FAITH Before me, even as behind, John Greenleaf Whittier. And night's deep darkness has no chain to bind George D. Prentice. WITH LOVE-FROM MOTHER There's a letter on the bottom of the pile, Its envelope a faded yellow brown, And the postmark names a little unknown town. But the hurried man of business pushes all the others by, for gain, The while he reads what mother writes from up in Maine. 1 There are quirks and scratchy quavers of the pen Where it struggled in the fingers old and bent. There are places that he has to read again And ponder on to find what mother meant. There are letters on his table that enclose some bouncing checks; |