The Young Ladies' Class Book: A Selection of Lessons for Reading, in Prose and Verse

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Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1841 - Readers - 408 pages
 

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Page 319 - Rome ! my country ! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires ! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye ! Whose agonies are evils of a day — A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
Page 104 - THE groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them — ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems ; in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication.
Page 222 - What sought they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? — They sought a faith's pure shrine. Ay, call it holy ground, — The soil where first they trod! They have left unstained what there they found — Freedom to worship God ! Felicia Hemans.
Page 371 - THE EPITAPH. Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown ; Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Page 42 - Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men, And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade and glen. And now, when comes the calm, mild day, as still such days will come, To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home, 4» When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still, And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill, The south wind searches for the flowers, whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find...
Page 335 - You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one?
Page 368 - For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Page 334 - Must we but blush?— Our fathers bled. Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylae! What, silent still? and silent all? Ah! no;— the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, "Let one living head, But one, arise,— we come, we come!
Page 369 - Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. Th...
Page 279 - Thy habitation from eternity! 0 dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer 1 worshipp'd the Invisible alone. Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it...

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