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President’s Day in Poetry and Prose

Feb16

Leetla Giorgio Washeenton by Thomas Augustine Daly.

More Washington Poetry.

O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman.

White House site with mini-biographies of all 44 U.S. Presidents.

More information on the Presidents for President’s Day.

Recommended Children’s Books about the Presidents:

The Buck Stops Here by Alice Provensen.

So You Want to be President? by Judith St. George and David Small.

Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull.

A Book of Americans by Rosemary Carr and Stephen Vincent Benet.

George Washington and the Founding of a Nation by Albert Marrin

George Washington’s World by Genevieve Foster

The Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz.

Old Hickory: Andrew Jackson and the American People by Albert Marrin.


Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman

Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered
 by Barry Denenberg

Unconditional Surrender: U. S. Grant and the Civil War by Albert Marrin.


If You Grew Up WIth Abraham Lincoln by Ann McGovern

Bully For You, Teddy Roosevelt by Jean Fritz

The Great Adventure: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of Modern America by Albert Marrin.

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery by Russell Freedman.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Russell Freedman.

Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter’s Story by Wilborn Hampton.

Dickensian Birthday Celebration

Feb7

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens!

Born on this date in 1812, Mr. Dickens has been delighting readers for over 150 years.

Dickens Novels I’ve Read: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend

DIckens Novels I Have Yet to Enjoy: Hard Times, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Favorite Dickens Hero: Pip, Great Expectations

Favorite Dickens Villain(ess): Madame Defarge, Tale of Two Cities

Favorite Tragic Scene: Mr. Peggotty searching for Littel Em’ly (Is that a scene or an episode?)

Favorite Comic Character: Mr. Micawber, David Copperfield

Favorite Comic Scene: Miss Betsy Trotter chasing the donkeys out of her yard, David Copperfield

Strangest Dickens Christmas Story We’ve Read: “The Poor Relation’s Story”

Best Dickens Novel I’ve Read: A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield is a close second.

Dickens-related posts at Semicolon:

LOST Reading Project: Our Mutual Friend by Charles DIckens.

Scrooge Goes to Church

Dickens Pro and Con on his Birthday.

Quotes and Links

Born February 7th

Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

A Little More Dickens

Other DIckens-related links:
Mere Comments on Dickens’ Christianity.

A DIckens Filmography at Internet Film Database.

George Orwell: Essay on Charles DIckens.

Edgar Allan Poe Meets Charles Dickens.

An entire blog devoted to Mr. DIckens and his work: DIckensblog by Gina Dalfonzo.

And finally, here’s a re-post of my own Dickens Quiz. Can you match the quotation with the Dickens novel that it comes from?

1. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

2. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

3. “I would rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a life as this!”

4. “It’s over and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.”

5. “If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass–a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience–by experience.”

6. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

7. “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.”

8. “It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,” said he, “to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel.”

(HINT: these come from the eight DIckens novels that I have read. Which is from which?)

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 26th

Feb26

Victor Hugo, b.1802. One of my Top Ten Favorite Authors of All Time. Les Miserables may be the best novel I’ve ever read. I certainly can’t think of a better one right now. I started re-reading it in december, got bogged down, need to get back to it. Right now books that require any great measure of concentration are beyond my abilities, what with everything else going on in my life. Oh, well, to everything there is a season.

Previous posts on Victor Hugo:
Christmas, 1823
February 26, 2005
February 29, 2004: Belated Birthday Wishes
Barbara Curtis (Mommy Life) on Les Miserables: Legalism and Grace

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: George Washington

Feb22

Today is George’s REAL birthday as opposed to that amalgamation of a President’s Day that we celebrated a week or two ago. So I thought you might enjoy a couple of selections of Washingtonian poetry:

From James Russell Lowell:

“Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,
But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,
Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,
Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content;
Modest, yet firm as Nature’s self; unblamed
Save by the men his nobler shamed;
Not honored then or now because he wooed
The popular voice, but that he still withstood;
Broad-minded, higher-souled; there is but one
Who was all this, and ours, and all men’s,
Washington.”

By John Greenleaf Whittier:

“Thank God! the people’s choice was just,
The one man equal to his trust,
Wise beyond lore, and without weakness, good,
Calm in the strength of fearless rectitude.
His rule of justice, order, peace,
Made possible the world’s release;
Taught prince and serf that power is but a trust,
And rule, alone, that serves the ruled, is just,
That Freedom generous is, but strong
In hate of fraud and selfish wrong.

To accompany the famous picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emmanuel Gottleib Leutze, here’s a set of words to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”, author anonymous, found in my book, The Year’s Entertainments, compiled and selected by Inez McAfee:
Washington Crossing the Delaware, c.1851

Washington’s Christmas Party

Come, all who love a merry tale
With joke both true and hearty,
We’ll tell you how George Washington
Once made a Christmas party.
Across the Delaware quite plain
The British flag was vaunted,
His troops ill-clad, the weather bad
And yet he was undaunted.

“Come boys,” he said, “we’ll go tonight
Across the raging river;
The troops will be at Christmas sports
And will suspect it never,
The Hessians all will keep this night
With games and feasting hearty;
We’ll spoil their fun with sword and gun,
And take their Christmas party.”

And so they row across the stream,
Though storms and foe pursue them,
The fishermen from Marblehead
Knew just how to go through them.
Upon the farther shore they form
And then surround the city,
The Hessians all after their ball
Were sleeping, what a pity.

And when at last at call, to arms!
They tried to make a stand, sir,
They soon took fright and grounded arms
To Washington’s small band, sir.
Across the stream they took that day,
One thousand Hessians hearty,
Their fun was spoiled, their tempers roiled,
By this famous Christmas party.

Finally, here’s a link to my favorite Washington poem, a poem I posted a few years ago, Leetla Giorgio Washeenton by Thomas Daly.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 17th

Feb17

Thomas Robert Malthus, b. 1766. “Population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio.” What Malthus didn’t consider.

Ann Manning, b. 1807.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, b. 1879. Author of Understood Betsy.

Bess Streeter Aldrich, b. 1881. Nebraska author of A Lantern in her Handand many other books and short stories. I read a description of her writing as “cheerful realism.”

Robert Newton Peck, b. 1928. Author of the “Soup” books.

Chaim Potok, b. 1929. Rabbi and author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. “I would prefer to say that the universe is meaningful, with pockets of apparent meaninglessness, than to say it is meaningless with pockets of apparent meaningfulness. In other words I have questions either way.” (Potok in Christianity Today, September 8, 1978)

Ruth Rendell, b. 1930. Author of detective fiction and also other non-detective fiction using the pseudonym, Barbara Vine. “I think that most writers have these two opposing feelings co-exist. One, this is the most wonderful work of art since War and Peace, and also this is the most awful trash, and why did I ever write it?”

I feel that way about almost everything I write–especially the latter feeling. Does that mean I’m a real writer?

Cathy at Poohsticks on Ruth Rendell.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 8th

Feb8

John Ruskin, b. 1819. Known as a literary and art critic, Ruskin lived a rather tragic life. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, and his wife left him and married the painter Millais. He fell in love with a young Irish girl, but she would not marry him and she later died. He lost his faith in Christianity, suffered from mental illness, and finally re-embraced the Christian faith of his youth, although he refused to believe in hell. Maybe this rejection had something to do with the fact that during episodes of mental illness he had horrendous visions of himself battling with Satan.

Henry Walter Bates, b. 1825. Naturalist, entomologist, and evolutionist. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863. Has anybody out there read it?
If you’d like to know more about this pioneer in entomology, here’s a good article from The New Yorker, August 22, 1988, about Bates’s life and travels along the Amazon.

Jules Verne, b. 1828. In a letter: “I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes.”

Digby Mackworth Dolben, b. 1848. English poet, he was rather a character. He wrote love poetry to another (male) student at Eton and then considered conversion to Roman Catholicism and went around wearing a Benedictine monk’s habit. He drowned in a rather mysterious accident at the age of nineteen before he could go up to Oxford.

Kate Chopin, b. 1851. American author of The Awakening.

Martin Buber, b. 1878. Jewish philosopher and teacher. In 1938 he left Germany and went to live in Jerusalem. He wrote the book, I and Thou about the relationships of people to people and persons to God. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”

John Grisham, b. 1955. OK, I’m not really terribly intellectual at all. Of all the authors who have birthdays today, the only two I’ve read are Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days and John Grisham. Which Grisham novel do you like best? Do you agree with me that his novels have not gotten better but rather the opposite? I did enjoy The Firm and The Client and, my favorite, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read his latest yet, but I’ve seen it in all the stores.

Edited slightly and reposted from February 8, 2006.

Poetry Friday: Abraham Lincoln

Feb8

Tuesday is Lincoln’s Birthday. So I’m leaving you with a couple of Lincoln elegies.

O Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Lincoln by John Gould Fletcher
(an excerpt, go here for the entire poem.)

There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness,
Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter;
A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth 15
Towards old things;
Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God,
Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last;
Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost,
Many bitter winters of defeat; 20
Down to the granite of patience
These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking,
And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it
The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.

Not proud, but humble,
Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service;
For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit
Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 4th

Feb4

George Lillo, b. 1693, British playwright. He wrote what he called “domestic tragedies” about common people instead of heroes and kings.

Josiah Quincy, b. 1772, Congressman, judge of the Massachusetts municipal court, state representative, mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College.

Mark Hopkins, b. 1802, American educator and Christian apologist. He wrote a very popular nineteenth century text on apologetics called Evidences of Christianity.

William Harrison Ainsworth, b. 1805, English historical novelist. Several of his novels are available at Project Gutenberg.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, b. 1887. English novelist. She wrote many novels, mostly set in the English countryside of Sussex. Her novel, Joanna Godden, is available from Virago Press.

MacKinlay Kantor, b. 1904, American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his novel Andersonville. It was a “grimly realistic” novel about the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville. Has anyone read it?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, b. 1906, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and member of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Here’s a very interesting poem by W.H. Auden, dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled Friday’s Child. I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s worth reading anyway.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 3rd

Feb3

Horace Greeley, b. 1811, American journalist. “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

Walter Bagehot, b. 1826, British essayist and journalist. “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”

Sidney Lanier, b. 1842, American poet. “Music is Love in search of a word.”

Gertrude Stein, b. 1874, writer and patron of artists and writers. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.” Quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.

James Michener, b. 1907, American novelist, author of Hawaii. “The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.”

Joan Lowery Nixon, b. 1927, Houston author of YA and children’s fiction. “My husband and I have four children, and when they were young I had only one day a week in which someone could watch the preschoolers and I could write. I discovered that you never find time to write. You make time.”

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 2nd

Feb2

Hannah More, b. 1745. Evangelical philathropist connected with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. In her youth she was also a friend of actor David Garrick, lexicographer Samuel Johnson, and politician and writer Horace Walpole. After her conversion to evangelical Christianity and her retreat from the high society of London, her friends were clergyman and hymn writer John Newton and anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce. She was active in the anti-slavery movement in England, and her character makes an appearance in the movie, Amazing Grace, a movie I highly recommend, by the way.

Here’s a snippet from her poem, Slavery, published in 1788 to coincide with the first parliamentary debate on the slave trade.

. . . the countless host
I mourn, by rapine dragg’d from Afric’s coast.
Perish th’illiberal thought which wou’d debase
The native genius of the sable race!

Perish the proud philosophy, which sought
To rob them of the pow’rs of equal thought!

James Joyce, b. 1882. “Bayard himself confesses to never having finished Ulysses, by James Joyce. Personally, I have a theory that there is a very good chance that Joyce himself didn’t even finish writing the book, since I have never actually met anyone who has read the thing cover to cover.” —Sarah Vine in a review of Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read) by M. Bayard. Ms. Vine didn’t read Mr. Bayard’s book, either. Has anyone here actually read Ulysses, other than Madame MM-V, that is. I must say I’ve never felt the urge. It’s on my list of “Books That If I Had More Than One Life I Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately My Days Are Numbered.” What’s on your list of that name?

Under the Heaventree, an essay by Frederica Matthews-Green on the Christian life and Christian theology in the style of a chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses. At least Ulysses is good for something.

James Stephens, b. 1882. Irish novelist and poet. He was a friend of James Joyce.

Ayn Rand, b. 1905. The Fountainhead is one of the books on the list for my LOST project, but I’m not about to spend my time on that massive tome either. I think that all I’d get for my time and energy is a very long expostion in fiction of Sawyer’s philosophy, “It’s every man for himself, Freckles.”


Judith Viorst, b. 1931. Author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Atheneum, 1972. We’ve all had them. Reading about Alexander’s bad day somehow helps me to laugh at my own bad days in a misery-loves-company sort of way.