English Literature for Boys and Girls eBook

Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 780 pages of information about English Literature for Boys and Girls.

English Literature for Boys and Girls eBook

Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 780 pages of information about English Literature for Boys and Girls.

Mother Maudlin then calls for Puck-hairy, her goblin.  He appears, crying: 

            “At your beck, madam.” 
    “O Puck my goblin!  I have lost my belt,
    The strong thief, Robin Outlaw, forced it from me,”

wails Mother Maudlin.  But Puck-hairy pays little attention to her complaints.

“They are other clouds and blacker threat you, dame;
You must be wary, and pull in your sails,
And yield unto the weather of the tempest. 
You think your power’s infinite as your malice,
And would do all your anger prompts you to;
But you must wait occasions, and obey them: 
Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast,
A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen,
Till you have ’scaped the rocks that are about you.

MAUDLIN.  What rocks about me?

PUCK.  I do love, madam,
    To show you all your dangers—­when you’re past them! 
    Come, follow me, I’ll once more be your pilot,
    And you shall thank me.

MAUDLIN.  Lucky, my loved Goblin!”

And here the play breaks off suddenly, for Jonson died and left it so.  It was finished by another writer* later on, but with none of Jonson’s skill, and reading the continuation we feel that all the interest is gone.  However, you will be glad to know that everything comes right.  The good people get happily married and all the bad people become good, even the wicked old witch, Mother Maudlin.

F.  G. Waldron.

Chapter L RALEIGH—­“THE REVENGE”

SOME of you may have seen a picture of a brown-faced sailor sitting by the seashore, telling stories of travel and adventure to two boy.  The one boy lies upon the sand with his chin in his hands listening but carelessly, the other with his hands clasped about his knees listens eagerly.  His face is rapt, his eyes the eyes of a poet and a dreamer.  This picture is called The Boyhood of Raleigh, and was painted by one of our great painters, Sir John Millais.  In it he pictures a scene that we should like to believe was common in Sir Walter Raleigh’s boyhood, but we cannot tell if it were really so or not.  Beyond the fact that he was born in a white-walled thatched-roofed farmhouse, near Budleigh Salterton in Devonshire, about the year 1552, we know nothing of Raleigh’s childhood.  But from the rising ground near Hayes Barton, the house in which he was born, we catch sight of the sea.  It seems not too much to believe that many a time Walter and his brother Carew, wandered through the woods and over the common the two and a half miles to the bay.  So that from his earliest days Walter Raleigh breathed in a love and knowledge of the sea.  We like to think these things, but we can only make believe to ourselves as Millais did when he went to Budleigh Salterton and painted that picture.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
English Literature for Boys and Girls from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.