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From Chaucer to Tennyson / With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors cover

From Chaucer to Tennyson / With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors

Chapter 135: WORK AND WORTH.
By Henry A. Beers
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About This Book

A concise survey traces the development of English literature from the aftermath of the Norman Conquest through the nineteenth century, focusing on belles lettres and the language's evolution toward modern forms. Arranged in period chapters, it surveys major movements and representative genres — medieval and Renaissance poetry and drama, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shifts, and nineteenth-century developments — and provides short selections, portraits, and recommended reading lists for each chapter. Anglo-Saxon texts and early Scottish vernacular literature are purposely omitted, and works in philosophy, history, and science are treated only incidentally.



Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

WORK AND WORTH.

[From Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work" must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the price;

O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:


But all, the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:


Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I could never be,

All men ignored in me,

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD.

O, to be in England

Now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf

Round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England—now!


And after April, when May follows,

And the white throat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dew-drops—at the bent spray's edge—

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower,

Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

INDEX.

An index to the English authors and writings and the principal English periodicals mentioned in this volume.