Produced by Charlene Taylor, JoAnn Greenwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE MELODY OF EARTH AN ANTHOLOGY OF GARDEN AND NATURE POEMS FROM PRESENT-DAY POETS SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY MRS. WALDO RICHARDS [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1918 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY GERTRUDE MOORE RICHARDS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Published March 1918_ TO MY DEAR SISTER A LOVER OF GARDENS FOREWORD How many of us are conscious of the subtle melodies, "through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech"? Our poets are listeners; their ears are tuned to the magic call of secret voices that we who are not singers may never hear. They capture the "Melody" in chalices of song, and their message is: that whosoever will bend his ear to earth, may hear from field and furrow, from the many-bladed grass and the soft-petalled flowers--in the soughing of the pine tree or the rustle of leaves--an immortal music that revivifies the soul. In the quiet tilled spots of earth, from time immemorial, men have sown rare seeds of poetic thought that have flowered into song. Amiel wrote in his _Journal_: "All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing whether the seed fall into earth or into souls; man is a husbandman, and his work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it everywhere." The poets are our seed-sowers, and _their_ work is to develop life and to enrich it. They are never happier than when writing about gardens and the growing things of earth--at once their symbol and their solace. In turn gardens have in the poets their happiest interpreters. Here I have culled and gathered together songs and poems that reflect the melody and harmony of Nature's forces. In these days of the world's travail, let us seek inspiration and content within the delightful confines of these Gardens of Poetry. GERTRUDE MOORE RICHARDS _March_, 1918 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mrs. Richards tenders her sincere thanks to the publishers and poets who have so generously accorded their permission to use copyrighted poems: To the American Tract Society for "Seeds" and "The Philosopher's Garden," John Oxenham, from _Bees in Amber_. To Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for "The Mocking-Bird," Frank L. Stanton, from _Songs of the Soil_. To the Baker & Taylor Co. for "June Rapture" and "The Rose," Angela Morgan, from _The Hour has Struck, and Other Poems_ and _Utterance, and Other Poems_. To The Biddle Press for "The Old-fashioned Garden" and "Poppies," John Russell Hayes, from _Collected Poems_. To the Bobbs-Merrill Company for "Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer," James Whitcomb Riley, from _Complete Works_.