Blanche Wilder Bellamy

Open Sesame! Poetry and Prose for School Days Part Three Blanche Wilder Bellamy

Publisher Marketing: 1898. Arranged for students over fourteen years old. From the Preface: The third volume of Open Sesame: Poetry and Prose for Schooldays completes the series and represents many phases of literature, dramatic and narrative, epic and lyric, political and domestic. Among the selections are many of the recognized masterpieces of the language; -Wordworth's Intimations of Immortality, called by Emerson the high water mark which the intellect of the age has reached; The Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, which Coleridge admired so much as to appropriate and Anglicize it from the work of a German girl, and Kubla Khan, his own dream; Blanco White's Sonnet to Night, dear to Wordsworth's heart, and called by Coleridge the greatest sonnet in the English language; many specimens of Shakespeare and Milton, and fragments from Spenser, the poet's poet. Other selections have a secondary interest, like the Lost Leader of Browning, which, rumor says, hints at Wordsworth as a traitor to the Liberal cause; or the humorous-pathetic words of Jane Welsh Carlyle, which give a picture of genius at home, behind the doors of Craigenputtock; while boys will be interested to find the work of others young like themselves, Thanatopsis, written by Bryant at twenty-three; the sonnets of the youthful Keats; extracts from the journal of Longfellow, just out of college; and Spartacus to the Gladiators, written by Elijah Kellogg as a junior declamation.