TWO VISIONS. UNWRITTEN HISTORY.
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LITERARY.
TWO VISIONS.
Where close the curving mountains drew, To clasp the stream in their embrace, With every outline, curve and hue Reflected in its placid face,
The plowman stopped his team to watch The train as swift it thundered by; Some distant glimpse of life to catch, He strains his eager, wistful eye.
The morning freshness lies on him,
Just wakened from his balmy dreams:
The travelers, begrimed and dim,
Think longingly of mountain streams.
Oh, for the joyous mountain air,
The fresh delightful autumn day
Among the hills! The plowman there
Must have perpetual holiday!
And he, as all day long he guides His steady plow, with patient hand, Thinks of the flying train that glides Into some new enchanted land.
Where, day by day, no plodding round Wearies the frame and dulls the mind Where life thrills keen to sight and sound With plows and farmers left behind.
Even so, to each, the untrod ways Of life are touched by fancy's glow,
That ever sheds its brightest rays Upon the path we do not know. Agnes M. Macbar.
UNWRITTEN HISTORY.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" "History and biography," said Edward Everett, "for the most part record the lives only of those who have obtained military, political or literary distinction; or who in any other career have passed through extraordinary viscissitudes of fortune. The unostentatious routine of private life, although in the aggregate more important to the welfare of the community, cannot from its nature figure in the public annals."
The world owes much to what its poets have never sung, its historians have never written, its philosophers have never formulated. It is undoubtedly true that the history of the great mass of mankind has never found its way into books. The useful and truly noble lives of many men and women are so prosaic in detail, so commonplace in surroundings, that they begin and end in obscurity. And yet the world is made up of commonplace people and seemingly dull lives. At every fireside and in