Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

For more to me than birds or flowers,

My playmate left her home,

And took with her the laughing spring,

The music and the bloom.

She kissed the lips of kith and kin,

She laid her hand in mine:

What more could ask the bashful boy

Who fed her father’s kine?

She left us in the bloom of May:

The constant years told o’er