Favorite Authors in Prose and Poetry

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James Thomas Fields
James R. Osgood, 1884
 

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Page 177 - With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags^ Plying her needle and thread — Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger and dirt; And still with a voice of dolorous pitch — Would that its tone could reach the rich! — She sang the
Page 320 - Comes a still voice : — yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course. Nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again ; And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod,...
Page 113 - I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting, which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study, (which I take to be my portion in this life,) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave, something so written, to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.
Page 325 - A tory! a tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!" It was with great difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked hat restored order; and, having assumed a tenfold austerity of brow, demanded again of the unknown culprit, what he came there for, and whom he was seeking? The poor man humbly assured him that he meant no harm, but merely came there in search of some of his neighbors, who used to keep about the tavern. "Well — who are they? — name them.
Page 177 - Oh! but to breathe the breath Of the cowslip and primrose sweet With the sky above my head, And the grass beneath my feet, For only one short hour To feel as I used to feel, Before I knew the woes of want And the walk that costs a meal!
Page 271 - Look on the rising sun : there God does live, And gives His light, and gives His heat away, And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday. ' And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love ; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
Page 115 - God's almightiness, and what He works, and what He suffers to be wrought with high providence in His church, to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship.
Page 324 - Bummel, the schoolmaster, doling forth the contents of an ancient newspaper. In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of handbills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens...
Page 230 - EVE — Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
Page 81 - The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away ; blessed be the Name of the Lord ! — "His Highness," says Harvey,3 "being at Hampton Court, sickened a little before the Lady Elizabeth died.

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