Poems

——BY——
HENRY REED CONANT.
“’Tis pleasure, sure, to see one’s name in print: A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.”
—Byron.
1893. The Sun Publishing Co., Kaukauna, Wis.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1893 By Henry Reed Conant, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
To My Brother, Carlos Everett Conant, A. B., Now Professor of Languages in the Chaddock College, Ill., and formerly Professor in the State University, of Minnesota, This Book of Poems is Affectionately Inscribed.

Henry Reed Conant was born in Janesville, Wis., on the seventeenth day of February, 1872. When four years of age he removed to Vermont, the native state of his parents Henry Clay and Dora Evaline (Reed) Conant. Henry was educated in the public schools and at the Morrisville “People’s Academy,” Vermont, and in his fifteenth year returned to the west.
He inherited from his New England ancestors a deep love of nature, and pronounced religious and moral strength, which tinge the whole body of his rhymes and poems. Like many poets in their juvenile days Mr. Conant’s first lines were simple and artless, and the world of critics can hardly assail him for penning his first rhymes in honor of his “first love,” thus:
“Of all the lassies in the land That e’er I chanced to view, Methinks the fairest one I saw Had sparkling eyes of blue.”
His first published poem appeared in a little story paper, February, 1890, at Belvidere, Ills. Nearly all of Mr. Conant’s poems were written in Wisconsin, his native state. The selected poems forming this volume reflect the young poet’s individuality to a sensible degree. The trend of his thoughts and genius is toward the more solemn and religious aspects of nature, and of human experience. He dwells in the forest’s shade, on the banks of rivers flowing through lea and woodland, by the grave of a little child, and wanders back to his old New England home—to the scenes of his childhood.