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

And looking up with brilliant eyes to Him

Who bids you bloom unblanched amid the waste

Of desolation. Man, who, panting, toils

O’er slippery steeps, or, trembling, treads the verge

Of yawning gulfs, o’er which the headlong plunge

Is to eternity, looks shuddering up,

And marks ye in your placid loveliness—

Fearless, yet frail—and, clasping his chill hands,

Blesses your pencilled beauty. Mid the pomp

Of mountain summits rushing on the sky,