Copyright 1923 SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 635254 For permission to use copyrighted material grateful acknowledgment is made to Harcourt, Brace and Company for "Halcyon Days" from Piping and Panning by Edwin Meade Robinson, copyright 1920; to Charles Scribner's Sons for "The Vagabond" by Robert Louis Stevenson; to Methuen and Company for "Household Gods" by E. V. Lucas; to George H. Doran Company for "Holy Ireland" from Poems, Essays and Letters by Joyce Kilmer, copyright 1914, and “On Unanswering Letters" from Mince Pie by Christopher Morley, copyright 1919; to Dodd, Mead and Company for "Humor As I See It" by Stephen Leacock, and "Seeing People Off" by Max Beerbohm; to Doubleday, Page and Company for the letter to Frank N. Doubleday by Walter Hines Page (from The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, by Burton J. Hendrick, copyright 1922), and "The Prophecy of a New Era" by Walt Whitman; to Frederick A. Stokes Company for "American Tradition" from The American Spirit by Franklin K. Lane, copyright 1918; to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and to the author for "A Farmer Remembers Lincoln" from Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner; to Henry Holt and Company and the author for "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man" from North of Boston by Robert Frost, copyright 1915, "Skyscraper" from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916, "Old Susan" from The Listeners by Walter de la Mare, and "The Beau of Bath" from The Beau of Bath, and Other One-Act Plays by Constance D'Arcy Mackay, copyright 1915; to Harper and Brothers and the author for "No. 1075 Packs Chocolates" from Working with the Working Woman, by Cornelia Stratton Parker, copyright 1922 by Harper and Brothers, and the letter to Miss L. L. White by James Russell Lowell; to Miss Mary Carolyn Davies and Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite for Miss Davies's poem "Fifth Avenue and Grand Street" from Victory! Celebrated by Thirty-eight American Poets, edited by Mr. Braithwaite; to Edwin Markham for "The Man with the Hoe" from The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems; and to Miss Anzia Yezierska for "The Fat of the Land" from The Fat of the Land. The following selections are reprinted by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers: "Calvin" from My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner; "A Kitten" from In the Dozy Hours by Agnes Repplier, by permission of the author; “The Wild Ride" by Louise Imogen Guiney, and "Civilization" and "Days" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 274.11 PREFACE The four books of Literature and Life present a complete course in literature for secondary schools. They are the result of many years of experience and study, and the entire series was planned in advance of the publication of the first book. They are not merely anthologies of standard classics arranged according to gradation or types or any other casual method of organization. Not only is each book complete in itself, but it has a definite function to perform in relation to the other books in the series. The four volumes provide a course in English and American literature that is both complete and unified. A convenient illustration of this method may be found in the treatment of literary history. The second book, for example, contains a Story of American Literature. This story differs from the conventional history in that while it presents biographies and criticism with illustrative literature, it also uses all this material to build up an understanding of American literature as an expression and interpretation of American life. It is placed in Book Two because students have already acquired, in the grammar school and the junior high school, considerable acquaintance with the major American authors, and are now mature enough to gather up the threads of the story so that their knowledge may become a permanent possession. This knowledge they use in Books Three and Four, where selections from American literature are also found, but placing the historical outline in the earlier years gives better opportunity for building up a knowledge, in the third and fourth years, of the longer and more complex study of English literary history. Governing ideas of the series as a whole are: (1) that "in books lies the soul of the whole past time," and that the avenue of approach to this spiritual heritage lies in creative reading (as explained in the Introduction on page 1); (2) that the separate masterpieces are, for the purpose of the school, so many chapters or paragraphs or songs in the great Book of Literature itself, which is the true subject of our study; and (3) that literature is not something belonging to the past alone, or to our re-creation of the past, but results from a perennial and neverdying instinct of humanity, operative today as well as in the time of Shakespeare. Thus contemporary literature is brought into constant and vital relation to the literature produced in former ages. Literary history is not like other history. Progress is not the keynote. We do not compare highly developed literary forms of today with primitive forms of the past as we compare the science of today with the alchemy and magic of the Middle Ages. Literature of whatever age is an expression of the life of that age, of course, but it is more. If it has endured, it is also the expression of fundamental instincts and emotions. Beneath external differences there is the eternal heart of man. To learn the facts of Shakespeare's life is worth while, but it is far more important to come into immediate and vital contact with that world of the imagination, transcending |