PREFACE. "OPEN SESAME" is a collection of poetry and prose to be committed to memory. The second in the series of three volumes is especially arranged and adapted for boys and girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. It aims, like Volume First, at once to stimulate and to feed the memory, making children learn to love and love to learn good literature. The English classics are widely represented; translations from foreign classics have been freely used; and, in addition to these, selections have been made from that large body of literature which, from its appeal to the spirit of the time, may be designated "popular classics." The hero of the "Arabian Nights" tale found the words "Open Sesame" a key which unlocked to him a storehouse of treasure, and the editors hope that the fable may be repeated in fact with each young student of these volumes. The editors extend their cordial thanks to the following publishers and authors, whose generous co-operation has made the collection possible, and whose contributions appear in this volume: To Messrs. Scribner & Co., for poems by Sidney Lanier and Josiah G. Holland; to the Lippincott Publishing Co., for a poem by T. Buchanan Read; to Messrs. Routledge & Co., for extracts from the works of Guy de Maupassant, in the translation of Laura Ensor; to Messrs. Harper Bros., for a translation of "The Watch on the Rhine"; and to Gutenberg & Co., for poems by Rose Terry Cooke. To Messrs. George Bancroft, Carl Schurz, Francis M. Finch, Robert Lowell, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard W. Gilder, Henry W. Grady, John W. Chadwick, John M. Crawford, W. T. Meredith, Joaquin Miller, David L. Proudfitt, Richard Henry Stoddard, Rossiter Johnson, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Miss Edna Dean Proctor, Miss Margaret J. Preston; and to the literary executors of Messrs. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and John B. Gough. Selections from the writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, and of Lucy Larcom are published by business arrangement with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. |