XV

So, Willy, let you and me be wipers

Of scores out with all men - especially pipers!
And, whether they pipe us free from rats or fróm mice
If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise.
- Robert Browning.

FELLOW LABORERS

Not a star our eyes can see
Shines alone for you and me;
Distant worlds behold its light,
Ages hence 't will shine as bright.

Not a flower that breathes and blows
Just for us its perfume throws;

Hosts of happy insect things

Brush it with their quickening wings.

Brooks, as from the hills they flow,
Make green meadows as they go;
Cataracts of wrathful sound

Turn the mill-wheels round and round.

Each strong thing some service gives
Far and wide; and nothing lives
For itself or just its own:

"T is but death to live alone.

- Theodore C. Williams.

EACH AND ALL

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon

Stops his horse and lists with delight,

Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;

Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

AMERICAN IDEALS

THE DUTY OF AN AMERICAN

We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely-expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work; they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted, and enlarged, to our children and our children's children. To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood and endurance, and, above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great men who founded this republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

- Theodore Roosevelt.

THE OLD FLAG FOREVER

She's up there -Old Glory-where lightnings are sped; She dazzles the nations with ripples of red;

And she'll wave for us living, or droop o'er us dead

The flag of our country forever!