Here is indeed a great service for the daughter in the family to supply. She is the poetic individual in the home circle. It will be readily acknowledged as fitting that she should know poetry by heart. That she should sing poetry feelingly and speak it effectively will be forgiven by a business-hardened parent and a rough, deriding brother, more readily than if any other member of the family circle should make the attempt. And the persevering and enthusiastic girl will be repaid by finding that the tight outer case of the father will after a time be loosened and that he will be surprised to find himself enjoying what he did not know he liked. She will be gratified again when the heroic ballad, told to appeal to the brother who is in the chivalrous and fighting era of boyhood, fulfils its mission not only by amusing him, but by leading him up to the chivalric motives and to the conquest of selfishness by the higher ideal of honor and devoir. If, too, she will select for her evening reading volumes of the poets who are writing to-day in her own country, writing out of today's life and mood and hope and pain, she will be far more likely to find a sympathetic response in her living audience, than if she chooses from the pages of any souls of poets dead and gone, however classic.
[1] In the Appendix to this book will be found a reference to a special bibliography made as a guide to certain works of fiction that do illustrate country and village life in various States.
The scrubbing's done; my kitchen stands arrayed In shining tins, and order reigns supreme. And on the table, like a fairy dream, A row of pies and cakes, all freshly made And full of spicy odors, stands displayed; While from the oven, like a rising stream Of incense, comes a fragrance, warm, supreme ... The bread, its final browning still delayed. Now while I sit beside the oven door I take up my guitar upon my knee, And singing the old songs I knew of yore, My happy youth comes back again to me-- Music and incense rising on the air! Courage is mine, and all the world is fair!
Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter in her book, _At the Foot of the Rainbow_, makes a certain Scotch character say that he does not care for better talking than the "tongues in the trees"; for sounder preaching than the "sermons in the stones"; finer reading than the "books in the river"; no, nor better music than the "choirs of the birds." This music he calls the music of God; he would rather have this, every time, than "notes fra book."