The Singing Man: A Book of Songs and Shadows

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A Book of Songs and Shadows
By JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
BOSTON and NEW YORK
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1911
Published November 1911
Thanks are especially due to the editors of The American Magazine, Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, for their courteous permission to reprint certain of the poems included in this volume.
We make our songs as we must, from fragments of the joy and sorrow of living. What Life itself may be, we cannot know till all men share the chance to know.
Until the day of some more equal portion, there is no human brightness unhaunted by this black shadow: the thought of those unnumbered who pay all the heavier cost of life, to live and die without knowledge that there is any Joy of Living.
No song could face such blackness, but for the will to share, and for hope of the day of sharing.