Part 1 (1/2)

The Melody of Earth.

by Various.

FOREWORD

How many of us are conscious of the subtle melodies, ”through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech”?

Our poets are listeners; their ears are tuned to the magic call of secret voices that we who are not singers may never hear. They capture the ”Melody” in chalices of song, and their message is: that whosoever will bend his ear to earth, may hear from field and furrow, from the many-bladed gra.s.s and the soft-petalled flowers--in the soughing of the pine tree or the rustle of leaves--an immortal music that revivifies the soul.

In the quiet tilled spots of earth, from time immemorial, men have sown rare seeds of poetic thought that have flowered into song. Amiel wrote in his _Journal_: ”All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing whether the seed fall into earth or into souls; man is a husbandman, and his work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it everywhere.” The poets are our seed-sowers, and _their_ work is to develop life and to enrich it. They are never happier than when writing about gardens and the growing things of earth--at once their symbol and their solace. In turn gardens have in the poets their happiest interpreters.

Here I have culled and gathered together songs and poems that reflect the melody and harmony of Nature's forces. In these days of the world's travail, let us seek inspiration and content within the delightful confines of these Gardens of Poetry.

GERTRUDE MOORE RICHARDS

_March_, 1918

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mrs. Richards tenders her sincere thanks to the publishers and poets who have so generously accorded their permission to use copyrighted poems:

To the American Tract Society for ”Seeds” and ”The Philosopher's Garden,” John Oxenham, from _Bees in Amber_.

To Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for ”The Mocking-Bird,” Frank L. Stanton, from _Songs of the Soil_.

To the Baker & Taylor Co. for ”June Rapture” and ”The Rose,” Angela Morgan, from _The Hour has Struck, and Other Poems_ and _Utterance, and Other Poems_.

To The Biddle Press for ”The Old-fas.h.i.+oned Garden” and ”Poppies,” John Russell Hayes, from _Collected Poems_.

To the Bobbs-Merrill Company for ”Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer,”

James Whitcomb Riley, from _Complete Works_.

To Edmund A. Brooks, Minneapolis, for ”Daffodils” and ”From a Car-Window,” Ruth Guthrie Harding, from _The Lark went Singing, and Other Poems_.

To Messrs. Burns & Oates and to Alice Meynell (Mrs. Wilfrid Meynell) for ”To a Daisy” and ”The Garden” from _Collected Poems_; for ”Rosa Mystica,” Katharine Tynan (Mrs. Henry Albert Hinkson), from _The Flower of Peace_.

To The Century Co. for ”Larkspur,” James Oppenheim, from _War and Laughter_; for ”The Tilling,” Cale Young Rice, from _Trails Sunward_; for ”The Haunted Garden,” Louis Untermeyer, from _Challenge_.

To Messrs. Constable & Co. for ”For These,” Edward Thomas (Edward Eastaway), from _An Annual of New Poetry_.

To _Country Life_ (London) and to Mrs. Gurney personally for ”The Lord G.o.d planted a Garden” and ”A Garden in Venice,” by Dorothy Frances Gurney, from _Poems_.

To Messrs. Thomas Y. Crowell Company for ”Love planted a Rose,”

Katharine Lee Bates, from _America, and Other Poems_; for ”An Exile's Garden,” Sophie Jewett, from _Collected Poems_.

To Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons for ”The Spring Beauties,” Helen Gray Cone, from _The Chant of Love, and Other Poems_.

To Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co. for ”In a Garden,” Livingston L. Biddle, from _The Understanding Hills_.

To Messrs. George H. Doran Company for ”The Cricket in the Path,” ”Herb of Grace,” and ”Rain in the Night,” Amelia Josephine Burr, from _In Deep Places_ and _Life and Living_; for ”A Song in a Garden,” ”Shade,” and ”The Poplars,” Theodosia Garrison, from _The Dreamers, and Other Poems_; for ”Trees,” Joyce Kilmer, from _Trees, and Other Poems_; for ”June,”

Douglas Malloch, from _The Woods_; for ”Where Love is Life,” Duncan Campbell Scott, from ”The Three Songs” in _Lundy's Lane, and Other Poems_.