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Read Ebook: History of the Second Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry: A prisoner's diary A paper read at the officers' reunion in Boston May 11 1877 by Quincy Samuel M Samuel Miller
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Ebook has 262 lines and 12679 words, and 6 pages
SAINT ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES
With A Bibliographical Note
London
TO OLD DAN CHAUCER.
Maypole dance and Whitsun ale,
Sports of peasants in the dale,
Harvest mirth and junketting,
Fireside play and kiss-in-ring,
Ancient fun and wit and ease, --
Gone are one and all of these;
All the pleasant pastime planned
In the green old Mother-land:
Gone are these and gone the time
Of the breezy English rhyme,
Sung to make men glad and wise
Gone the tale and gone the song
Sound as nut-brown ale and strong,
Freshening the sultry sense
Out of idle impotence,
Sowing features dull or bright
With deep dimples of delight!
Thro' the Motherland I went
Seeking these, half indolent:
Up and down, saw them not:
Only found them, half forgot.
Buried in long-darken'd nooks
With thy barrels of old books,
Where the light and love and mirth
Of the morning days of earth
Sleeps, like light of sunken suns
Brooding deep in cob-webb'd tuns!
Everywhere I found instead,
Hanging her dejected head,
Barbing shafts of bitter wit,
The pale Modern Spirit sit--
While her shadow, great as Gog's
Cast upon the island fogs,
In the midst of all things dim
Loom'd, gigantically grim.
Honest Chaucer, thee I greet
In a verse with blithesomefeet.
And ino' modern bards may stare,
Crack a passing joke with Care!
Take a merry song and true
Fraught with inner meanings too!
Goodman Dull may croak and scowl:--
Leave him hooting to the owl!
Tight-laced Prudery may turn
Angry back with eyes that burn,
Reading on from page to page
Scrofulous novels of the age!
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