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Next to him was Love-Death, and at his feet thousands of musical instruments and song-books, love-letters, spots and pigments to beautify the face, and hundreds of tinselled toys for the same purpose, together with a few swords: "With these rivals have fought duels for their mistresses, and some have killed themselves," said Sleep. I could see that this Death was sandblind.

Some of them are moral, and others are very revengeful; and the greater part relates to certain local circumstances of the Jewish nation at the time they were written, with which we have nothing to do. It is, however, an error or an imposition to call them the Psalms of David; they are a collection, as song-books are now-a-days, from different song-writers, who lived at different times.

For the last forty years in Europe, and for the last ten years with us here in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been distributed, and stalls have been opened, and the people gaze and sing and receive spiritual nourishment, but not from us who have undertaken to provide it; while we, justifying our idleness by that spiritual food which we are supposed to furnish, sit by and wink at it.

Elmer that meeting him and his family had given him new ideas of life, and aroused a desire for better things both for himself and his son. The Sunday-school was well attended the next Sunday; and as Mr. Elmer had brought a package of song-books with him from Tallahassee, the scholars learned to sing several of the songs, and seemed to enjoy them very much.

They have all something to do with ships, sailors, and commerce; being for the sale of ships' stores, nautical instruments, arms, clothing, together with a tavern and grog-shop at every other door; bookstalls, too, covered with cheap novels and song-books; cigar-shops in great numbers; and everywhere were sailors, and here and there a soldier, and children at the doorsteps, and women showing themselves at the doors or windows of their domiciles.

Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have investigated the relation of the song-books especially the songs composed by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion to the form and quality of the surviving lyric verse.

Over sixty people were crowded into the two small rooms, most of them boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen, laughing, coughing, dragging their feet, shoving the heavy benches, dropping song-books. They greeted the snow-covered trio with a royal roar, and a few minutes later were singing, "Yes, we'll gather at the river," at the tops of their discordant voices.

There was a period in my latter boyhood when comic song-books, mostly of the Negro minstrely sort, satisfied my craving for poetic literature. I used to learn the songs by heart and invent and extemporize tunes for them. To this day I can repeat some of those rank Negro songs. My taste for books began early, but my taste for good literature was of a much later and of slow growth.

Tell the musician that he should play on the harmonica, and teach the women to sing songs; say to the poet, to the author, that he ought to cast aside his poems and romances, and compose song-books, tales, and stories, comprehensible to the uneducated people, they will say that you are mad.

The common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on all the song-books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs." It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently and gingerly.