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Highmount

Louis Untermeyer

For biographical note concerning the author, see "The Laughers," page 88.

This exquisite poem may well test the imagination of the reader. Bring out the contrast between the restless impatience of the sea and the calm solidity of the hills. Do not forget the rhyme.

HILLS, you have answered the craving
That spurred me to come;

You have opened your deep blue bosom
And taken me home.

The sea had filled me with the stress

Of its own restlessness;

My voice was in that angry roll

Of passion beating upon the world.

The ground beneath me shifted; I was swirled

In an implacable flood that howled to see

Its breakers rising in me,

A torrent rushing through my soul,

And tearing things free.

I could not control

A monstrous impatience, a stubborn and vain Repetition of madness and longing, of question and

pain,

Driving me up to the brow of this hill

Calling and questioning still.

And you-you smile

In ordered calm;

You wrap yourself in cloudy contemplation while
The winds go shouting their heroic psalm;
The streams press lovingly about your feet
And trees, like birds escaping from the heat,
Sit in great flocks and fold their broad green
wings.

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Rooted in quiet confidence, you rise

Above the frantic and assailing years;

Your silent faith is louder than the cries;

The shattering fears

Break and subside when they encounter you.
You know their doubts, the desperate questions-
And the answers too.

Hills, you are strong; and my burdens

Are scattered like foam;

You have opened your deep blue bosom
And taken me home.

Reprinted by permission of the author, and by permission. of, and special arrangement with, Henry Holt and Company.

May is Building Her House

Richard Le Gallienne

Richard Le Gallienne was born in Liverpool, January 20, 1866. He is a journalist and man of letters. He was educated at Liverpool College and has published numerous poems, sonnets, and

essays.

This beautiful fancy should be rendered with tenderness and delight. There is much music in the rhyme, which should be fully developed. Paint each picture as vividly as possible without destroying the onward flow of the verse.

MAY is building her house. With apple blooms
She is roofing over the glimmering rooms;
Of the oak and the beech hath she builded its beams,
And spinning all day at her secret looms,
With arras of leaves each wind-swayed wall
She pictureth over, and peopleth it all

With echoes and dreams,
And singing of streams.

May is building her house. Of petal and blade, Of the roots of the oak, is the flooring made, With a carpet of mosses and lichen and clover, Each small miracle over and over,

And tender, traveling green things strayed.

Her windows, the morning and evening star,
And her rustling doorways, ever ajar

With the coming and going

Of fair things blowing,

The thresholds of the four winds are.

May is building her house. From the dust of things She is making the songs and the flowers and the wings;

From October's tossed and trodden gold

She is making the young year out of the old;
Yea: Out of winter's flying sleet

She is making all the summer sweet,

And the brown leaves spurned of November's feet

She is changing back again into spring's.

Reprinted by permission of the author and Harper and Brothers, publishers of the author's works.

After Sunset

Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in New York City. She entered Smith College in 1899 and later studied music and languages in Heidelberg and Paris. She married Roscoe Platt Conkling in 1905. She is teaching English in Smith College at the present time, and contributes poems to a number of the leading magazines of the country.

with

An effective oral interpretation of this intimate study of one of Nature's most impressive phenomena requires slow rate, appropriate tone-color to depict the varying scenes and sentiments.

I HAVE an understanding with the hills

At evening, when the slanted radiance fills

Their hollows, and the great winds let them be,
And they are quiet and look down at me.
Oh, then I see the patience in their eyes
Out of the centuries that made them wise.
They lend me hoarded memory, and I learn
Their thoughts of granite and their whims of fern.

And why a dream of forests must endure
Though every tree be slain; and how the pure,
Invisible beauty has a word so brief

A flower can say it, or a shaken leaf,

But few may ever snare it in a song,

Though for the quest a life is not too long.
When the blue hills grow tender, when they pull
The twilight close with gesture beautiful,
And shadows are their garments, and the air
Deepens, and the wild veery is at prayer,
Their arms are strong around me; and I know
That somehow I shall follow when they go
To the still land beyond the evening star,
Where everlasting hills and valleys are,
And silence may not hurt us any more,
And terror shall be past, and grief and war.
Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Holt
and Company.

A Dakota Wheat Field

Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland was born in West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 16, 1860. He is a novelist and dramatist. As a boy he worked on a farm and went to school, and later taught school in Illinois. He began to write stories about 1893.

Residents of states having expansive wheat fields will recognize how true to nature is the following beautiful description. The poem, especially in the second stanza, offers opportunity for the study of changes in rate to express changing scenes and emotions.

LIKE liquid gold the wheat field lies,

A marvel of yellow and russet and green, That ripples and runs, that floats and flies,

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