Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Poems of the South, and Other Verse
The Anglo Saxon is the colonizer of the world. His axe and his rifle, his moral precepts and his Bible, turn the wilderness into a self-sustaining common wealth. Out of his industry comes the science of physical advancement, and out of his love for the great and sonorous words of Job, arises an oratory whose rugged fervor makes, in comparison, the pol ished philippic of the'greek seem cold and almost meaningless. A Greek oration, worked upon month after month, stands forth as a piece of statuary, chaste, flawless. It challenged the eye, the artistic sense. In Hampden's parliament a speech, spurred out by pas sion, the love of liberty, was crude as to form, but as warm and as living as the beat of a heart in distress. With the Greek, oratory was an art; with the Anglo Saxon, it was a passion. With the Italian, religion was a resplendent ceremony; with the Anglo Saxon it was a writhing of the soul. And this same differ ence is to be found in the poetry of the two ages, the ancient and the modern. One is an eternal strife to express form, the other, a never ending cry of the heart. The Anglo American inherited his religion and his poetry. The Elizabethan sap flows downward into Massachusetts, Kentucky. In one it has all the sombre ness of its source; in the other, all the humor of that rollicking age, for Jonson, Greene, Shakespeare, wept; but some of their tears were tears of delight. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.