Songs

Excerpt from Songs: A Song Writer Ever since I could read Songs, I have loved them. The dearest shelf of my book-case is that where rank, shoulder to shoulder, in loving brotherhood. Burns and Beranger, Campbell and Herrick. There, too, are those best-loved of all book-companions, the volumes which bring together the quaint fancies and delicate music of the lyrics of our Elizabethan Dramatists and our Cavalier Singers, and treasure for ever, in the Songs of Scotland and of Ireland, the sobs and laughs of bygone generations, for the admiration and the love of all coming centuries. Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, I reverence with awe. They are the forests, the mountain ranges, the oceans of our literature. But Song-writers are my familiar friends. With what ever-new delight I wander through the grassy valleys, the daisied fields, the summer orchards, by the tinkling rivulets of the land of Song. The Epic speaks to the brain. It demands that I labour up to a fitting comprehension of its grandeur. The Song sings to my heart, and my heart laughs, or answers in tears - what pleasant ones! - to every cry of nature which it utters. "Blessings be on them, and eternal praise," who have made the dead past so blossom with strange loveliness for the toiling present. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.