Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

thrilled you with love of our country. Or someone has said something that has set you on fire with ambition to do things— to be a great lawyer or doctor or manufacturer, or to travel to the farthest lands, or to build a great business. These ideals of life and religion, impulses to patriotic service, ambition to make your life count-all take you out of your usual self, enlarge your vision, awaken the best traits of your character. You could sing for joy. If you could express in words your feelings, you would be a poet, for out of sincere and deep emotion poetry is born.

Among all the emotions that men feel in their best moments, none are deeper and more filled with good than those connected with love of country and of those ideals of service and coöperation without which no country, in these times, can long endure. The growth, through many centuries, of this spirit of self-government is the most important fact in modern history. There are three ways in which this spirit has taken form: the feeling that men have a right to direct their own affairs; the knowledge that free government implies not absolute liberty of each one to do as he likes, but submission to rules and restrictions that men place on themselves of their own free will; and the sense of human brotherhood. The recognition of these three ideals has been of slow growth. Sometimes one has been stressed at the expense of others. Sometimes one of them, such as the idea of human brotherhood, has been held to apply to one country, our own, and not to our relation to men of other countries. But there have been great moments in the history of the nations when vast multitudes of men have been swept by powerful emotions drawing them out of themselves and on to some new advance toward freedom. Out of these emotions, at these dramatic moments in history, have come poems and prose that have helped to move men to sympathy with hopes and fears before unheeded.

It is, then, with literature as a means of expressing the loftiest ideals of liberty and service that the selections in this part of our book have to do. There are three groups. In the first are some records of the growth of the spirit of freedom. A hundred years ago, Greece, the survivor of the ancient nation

that contributed so much to human civilization in far distant centuries when all the rest of the world was the abode of barbarism and ignorance, was struggling for freedom from the cruel Turks. Many of the governments of Europe-kings, and emperors, not republics-wished to keep matters as they were. But in a poem like Byron's "Isles of Greece" we get some idea of how the spirit of freedom was gaining strength and how the struggles of the Greeks were hailed with sympathy in other parts of Europe. Years later, Italy was passing through the same crisis. Kings and emperors had divided Italy into small districts to keep down the spirit of freedom. But they could not stem the tide. It took about fifty years for Italy to win her freedom, but at last freedom was won. Browning's poem about the Italian patriot in England tells you something of the way in which this was accomplished, and the mighty spirit that moved men so that free government made another great step in advance. And then follow poems showing how England has stood for freedom, and how Englishmen in America, at a time when England was governed by a tyrannical king, cast off the yoke, and how in the last few years men everywhere responded to another call to overthrow a government that sought to extend its tyranny.

One of these topics is so important that the next section in our book is devoted exclusively to it. In all the progress of the idea and the method of free government, England and America have had a part. Free government is the crowning achievement of the English-speaking peoples, and it has spread to other peoples from their example. The section called "England and America" will enable you to see some of the steps in this progress-how liberal Englishmen recognized that the American Revolution was a war not against English people and English ideals, but against a government that was devoted to the enslavement of England itself as well as her colonies. It will also show some of the principles on which our government is founded.

In the last section the story is completed. First the passionate desire for liberty, growing up in Greece, in Italy, in England, and in America in times past, and once more blazing forth in the crisis of the World War. That is the first section of this part

J.H.L. 2-12

of our book. Next, the idea of free government-that is, the idea of a government, which always means restraint, holding in check the spirit of liberty that unrestrained would mean anarchy. Free government means "a liberty connected with order." And lastly the spirit of service, of brotherhood, of coöperation of all for the good of all, without which no free government can endure. There is no more important subject than this for you to study. It is something to be studied, that you may know that free government is not merely or even mainly a mode of electing presidents and legislatures. It is something for you to see in imagination, that you may realize what it has cost and through how many centuries it has developed, and that you may know, also, that we must guard it and carry it on farther in each generation. And it is something that you must feel, the expression of ideals and emotions that will so control you that you will swear to do your part to preserve what men have won of the right to rule themselves. For unless this study and imagination and feeling pass into action, unless you are willing to take the lessons of service that the selections in the last part of this group teach you as a motive force in your own life, tyranny in one form or another will build on the selfishness of men grown cold to the ideals of liberty and service, and free government will be no more. Which God forbid! The responsibility rests on you, you boys and girls who are now preparing not merely for happy lives and successful lives in free America, but for carrying on the great tradition of liberty and service.

[merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

10

The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero's harp, the lover's lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse;
Their place of birth alone is mute

To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires' "Islands of the Blest."

The mountains look on Marathon-
And Marathon looks on the sea;

15 And musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free;

10

For, standing on the Persian's grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

A king sat on the rocky brow

Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis;
And ships by thousands lay below,

And men in nations-all were his!
He counted them at break of day-
And when the sun set, where were they?

And where are they? and where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now—

The heroic bosom beats no more.
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?

15 'Tis something in the dearth of fame,
Though linked among a fettered race,
To feel at least a patriot's shame,
Even as I sing, suffuse my face;
For what is left the poet here?

20 For Greeks a blush-for Greece a tear.

Must we but weep o'er days more blest? Must we but blush?-Our fathers bled. Earth, render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! 25 Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopyla!

[blocks in formation]
« ZurückWeiter »