laise," was written by an army officer for the encouragement of the soldiers and the populace in the days of the French Revolution. The influence of that song on the destiny of France cannot possibly be estimated, and it lives now, more than a century after the Revolution, as an everlasting call to war against tyranny and oppression, a son of freedom for all the world. Truly the power of poetry is greater than we might suspect.

At all times of public excitement poetry has played its part, and sometimes-indeed, oftenvery poor poetry has had great influence on the public. Many great reforms have been influenced by popular songs. For example, it was due largely to a group of poets, now mostly forgotten, chief of whom was Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn Law rhymer," that the working people of England were roused against the old Corn Laws, which the government was induced to abolish in the year 1846. Of course, many warlike poems have been written after the event, such as "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Tennyson, and "Paul Revere's Ride," by Longfellow. These are not less inspiring because they record history, for history is a source of inspiration to noble effort; history and legend have supplied more themes to great poets than their own imagination could invent. Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," which are among the best known heroic poems in English, were written many centuries after the events they celebrate took place.

There is, indeed, an immense amount of verse that may be called "the poetry of action," in praise of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism. But it is easy to be led astray by the jingle of words if our mind is already disposed to a certain action and the words favor that. So that poetry is as dangerous as it is powerful, and may mislead as well as lead. It is easy to sound the praises of our own land and the deeds of our own soldiers; it is more difficult to see the good in other lands and among strange peoples. That we can best do in the quiet, thoughtful days of peace and industry.

THE POETRY OF COMMON THINGS THERE is hardly any end to the subjects with which poetry may be concerned, since poetry is as varied and extensive in its range as life itself. It is life in song. We have not, therefore, attempted to go much further in these little talks than to mention the chief departments of poetry. We must now remark the fact that great events are not always needed to furnish the

And here we

poet with a theme for his muse. may mention that the "poet's muse" is an expression derived from ancient times, when spirits or goddesses were supposed to watch over and inspire writers. These goddesses were called the Muses, and the ancient poets began their poems by calling upon the Muse of Poetry to inspire them. Homer, as translated by Pope, begins the "Iliad" thus:

"Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!" Assuredly the poet's muse does not depend upon the stirring times of war for inspiration, and that for the reason so well expressed by Milton in the famous lines:

"Peace hath her victories
No less renown'd than war."

The pages of the books in this series abound in beautiful poems that derive their interest entirely from daily life and the common things around us. There is poetry in everything, if we have only the soul to search it out. There is poetry in the common horse, working out its laborious life on the farm or in the city streets, as well as in the Arab's steed in splendid flight across the plain. There is poetry in the meadow, with its buttercups, its lambs, its gentle streams. There is poetry in the old armchair, the grandfather's clock, the kindly blue smoke arising from the hearth of the old village home. All common things are beautiful in the eye of the poet who loves his fellow-men and the quiet ways of life; and all these things are celebrated in the poems of English and American poets, which are remarkably rich in praise of the human affections.

After all, these are the enduring memoriesthe house we played in as little children, the friendly cat and dog, the fire in the old fireplace where we used to see such wonders, the old chair, the flowers at the window. And the reading of the poetry of common things will help you when you are older to keep these things tenderly in your hearts.

OUR FEELINGS IN POETRY EVEN reading without being careful to think over what one has read, it is not possible to have read a great number of poems without noticing that the feelings expressed in them, and the feelings they have awakened in us, are constantly changing. Nothing that is written touches our feelings or emotions so quickly and so deeply as poetry does, and now we will speak of some of the many different ways in which it can affect us.

BALACLAVA. THE RETURN 25TH OCTOBER, 1854.

"THE CHARGE OF THE SIX HUNDRED."

To make his fellow-men feel something of the joy that may be filling his own heart is one of the greatest things the poet can do. Indeed, all great things in literature have been accomplished by men and women giving to the world a powerful impression of their own inner thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

We are all moving through this life to the life that is beyond our earthly pilgrimage, the present life is called; and nothing can be more interesting to us than to know what is happening to our fellow-pilgrims, what they think of the great journey; and those of them who have the power to tell us are our great poets and philosophers.

But joy is not the only feeling the poet experiences-far from it. Sadness is often the feeling that comes to the thoughtful mind; joy more often keeps company with the thoughtless. The poet knows all our feelings: joy, sadness, hope, and the many different shades of these. We may call them "moods," meaning the frame of mind we may be in at one time, which will be quite different from our feeling at another. Poetry is the only lasting way of expressing these varying feelings so that they may be recalled long after they have passed away.

Now, this power to enter into the moods of others, and to draw hope from the words of the poets, is a great and precious thing. Hence, the writers whose poems have most of human feeling in them are most likely to be of service to mankind. But it must not be supposed that we can profit by reading only what we may call the poetry of joy that is to say, cheerful poems. Sorrow and sadness are quite as important to make our life complete; nay, they are needful to make us truly happy. We could not know true joy if we never knew what it was to be sad. So the poet must at times sing songs of sadness. Milton, as elsewhere we tell you, wrote two fine poems-they are quite short, and can each be read in ten or fifteen minutes-the one entitled "L'Allegro" and the other "Il Penseroso." The titles are taken from the Italian, and mean the cheerful and the pensive. That is to say, the first is a poem written, as it were, by a cheerful man, and the second by a melancholy man. The cheerful man looks at Nature and the world with the singing of the lark, and the melancholy man with the notes of the nightingale.

The one begins, "Hence, loathed Melancholy!" and the other, "Hence, vain deluding Joys!" Yet both are the work of the same poet, and convey feelings that must come to all of us in our different moods. The use of sadness in poetry is to purify our thoughts, to balance our minds;

for if we were always laughing with the jesters we should in time become incapable of earnest thought; and, as Longfellow tells us:

"Life is real! life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal."

From a wise mixture of joy and sadness springs hope, and so we are enabled to endure the trials of life. The best poetry is full of hope, because it is healthy, sane, and, as we have seen, in love with Nature and with common life.

HOW TO REMEMBER POETRY

THE memory ought to be a storehouse, not a lumber-room, says an old writer; and there is nothing we can store away in this magic chamber of our mind more worth having than the riches of the poets, which will outlast other possessions. "The pleasures of memory" have been sung by more than one poet, and though, of course, poetry is by no means the only one of these pleasures, it is one of the greatest. Here we will try to see how it may best be stored in our memory.

A little girl was once asked what her memory was, and she said, "It is the thing I forget with." To how many of us, both old and young, is the memory the thing we forget with! Yet it is quite an easy matter to make it the thing we remember with.

All our faculties can be made better by use. If we do not practise walking regularly, we shall in time become very poor walkers. That is so apparent that any boy or girl does not need to be told it. If we do not practise remembering, we shall in time find that our memory is of little This is perhaps not so clear to every one, and people, especially young people, need to be told about it.

use to us.

It is with our brain that we remember; our "memory" is one of the departments of the brain's work. One might think that memory could do only a certain amount of work; that it could remember just a certain number of things: that a time would come when, so to say, the storehouse of memory was full. But that is not so. There is no limit to what our brain, if properly set to work, will enable us to remember. In olden times, before printing was invented, whole books, such as Homer's "Iliad,” were carried for years in the memory of people. Most of our legends existed for ages in the memories of common people only, and some were not written down until hundreds of years had passed away. Now, of all written words, none are easier to carry in our minds than poetry, and we should make a habit of "learning by heart" as

many poems as possible; not merely for the sake of remembering them, but to exercise our minds, just as we go for walks to exercise our legs.

There are many "systems" of remembering, but if we begin young to remember what we have read we do not need systems; our minds, when young and fresh, form systems for themselves without any effort on our part. But there are a few simple rules that can help us.

We must read with close attention to what the writer has to say, be it in prose or poetry. We should read once in order to get a general idea of the author's story. For instance, to remember "The Wreck of the Hesperus," we read it first in order to get the story, noting how one thing follows on another: the skipper's little daughter, the skipper at the helm, the rising of the hurricane, binding of the child to the mast, skipper struck dead, and so on. By noting these points we remember easily how the story proceeds.

We next read more closely still, noting the chief points of each verse, thus: (1) wintry sea, little daughter; (2) eyes, cheeks, bosom; (3) beside the helm, on the lookout, and so forth. Finally, we have the actual words to remember, and this we do, first, by noting the rhythm and the rhyme; secondly, by emphasizing in our minds the "picture-words," as we call the particular words in each verse that raise up a picture before our minds. In the first verse of "The Hesperus," the picture-words are "wintry sea"; in the second, "fairy-flax" and "dawn." These words suggest pictures to us at once, and when we remember them the rest of the verse is easily recalled. Of course, we must read the poem many times before we have it "by heart," and it should be read aloud as often as possible.

WHY SHOULD WE READ POETRY? It is a curious thing that so many people seem to think it is not worth their while to read poetry. They tell us that they "cannot" read it. That may be because they have never tried seriously. But it is well worth the trying; and as we feel that every one should grow up with a real love for poetry, we state here very briefly, even if we do repeat some things already said, what are its chief uses. Poetry stirs our feelings and fills our minds with beautiful pictures, so that if we do not learn to love and understand it we are missing something that adds greatly to the pleasure of life.

natural in our tastes than later in life, and the taste for poetry is as natural as the liking for sweet sounds, the scent of flowers, and the colors of the sunset.

Poetry expresses all these delights of nature better than any other means we have for expressing them. It is splendid to see a grand sunset; it is fine to 'be able to look on a great artist's picture of a sunset; but it is betterfar better-to be able to remember all our lives the glorious words of some great poet who has described a sunset. Merely by recalling his magic words the joy we first felt in looking on this beautiful effect of nature arises in us afresh it is ours forever!

Surely this is a great thing that poetry can do. And people who do not keep the love of poetry in their hearts as they grow up lose one of the truest pleasures of life.

The writers of good poetry are few, and nothing is more foolish than to think, because we can make words rhyme with others, we can write truly poetic verses. But everybody is capable of reading, enjoying, and profiting by good poetry. Therefore, we should not lose the taste for reading verses, which most of us have when we are young; but we ought carefully to improve and strengthen that taste by reading as regularly as possible the works of the poets.

We have already said that poetry is the music of words; but it is more than that. It is the music of the universe. In the whole vast and wondrous world of created things there is a harmony of beauty that is felt by the true poet, and by him conveyed to the ordinary man.

When the great poets write their poems for us, they are enabling us to see into the heart of nature with something of their own keen insight. They lend us their eyes, so to speak, and they lend us their hearts also, for their poems express the feelings of their hearts far more warmly and clearly than these could ever be expressed in ordinary prose writing. There is no better education than to share with the greatest minds that have lived in this world of ours their feelings, their hopes and sorrows, their joys; and poetry enables us to do this.

Yes, blessings many times on all the sweet souls who have expressed themselves in poetry, and so may be said to live forever as the companions of our peaceful hours. They are our best friends, if we but turn to them; be it for noble words to refresh us in our hours of doubt and darkness; for fine pictures of the glories of the world to enlarge our love of its Creator; or for inspiring thoughts that urge us forward in

A NONSENSE POEM

BY MRS. E. T. CORBETT

THREE wise old women were they, were they,
Who went to walk on a winter day.
One carried a basket to hold some berries,
One carried a ladder to climb for cherries,
The third, and she was the wisest one,
Carried a fan to keep off the sun!

But they went so far, and they went so fast, They quite forgot their way at last—

So one of the wise women cried in fright, "Suppose we should meet a bear to-night! Suppose he should eat me!"

"And me!!”

"And me! ! !"

"What is to be done?" cried all the three. "Dear, dear!" said one, "we'll climb a tree; Then out of the way of the bears we'll be." But there wasn't a tree for miles around, They were too frightened to stay on the ground; So they climbed their ladder up to the top, And sat there screaming, "We'll drop! we'll drop!!"

But the wind was strong as wind could be,
And blew their ladder right out to sea!
So the three wise women were all afloat
In a leaky ladder instead of a boat;
And every time the waves rolled in,

Of course the poor things were wet to the skin.

Then they took their basket, the water to bail,
They put up their fan instead of a sail,
But what became of the wise women then—
Whether they ever sailed home again—
Whether they saw any bears or no-
You must find out, for I don't know.

CHERRIES

BY F. E. WEATHERLEY

UNDER the tree the farmer said,

Smiling and shaking his wise old head:

"Cherries are ripe! but then, you know, There's the grass to cut and the corn to hoe; We can gather the cherries any day,

But when the sun shines we must make our hay;
To-night, when the work has all been done,
We'll muster the boys, for fruit and fun."

Up on the tree a robin said,

Perking and cocking his saucy head:
"Cherries are ripe! and so to-day
We'll gather them while you make the hay;
For we are the boys with no corn to hoe,
No cows to milk, and no grass to mow.'
At night the farmer said: "Here's a trick!
These roguish robins have had their pick."

THE FROG

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

BE kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As "Slimy-skin," or "Polly-wog,"
Or likewise "Uncle James,"
Or "Gape-a-grin," or "Toad-gone-wrong,"
Or "Billy Bandy-knees":
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.

No animal will more repay

A treatment kind and fair, At least so lonely people say Who keep a frog (and, by the way, They are extremely rare).

THE HOYDEN

MISS AGNES had two or three dolls, and a box To hold all her bonnets and tippets and frocks; In a red leather thread-case that snapp'd when it

shut,

She had needles to sew with and scissors to cut; But Agnes lik'd better to play with rude boys, Than work with her needle, or play with her toys.