Read the excerpt from "John Burns of Gettysburg” by Bret Harte.Brief is the glory that hero earns,Briefer the story of poor John Burns:He was the fellow who won reknown,—The only man who didn't back down When the rebels rode through his native town
Read the excerpt from "Winter Morning Poem” by Ogden Nash.Winter is the king of showmen,Turning tree stumps into snow menAnd houses into birthday cakesAnd spreading sugar over lakes.Smooth and clean and frosty white,The world looks good enough to bite.That’s the season to be young,Catching snowflakes on your tongue!Snow is snowy when it’s snowing.I’m sorry it’s slushy when it’s going.
Read the excerpt from "Out in the Snow” by Louis Chandler Moulton.They saw the snow when they rose in the morning,Glittering ghosts of the vanished nightThough the sun shone clear in the winter dawningAnd the day with a frosty pomp was bright.Out in the clear, cold, winter weather—Out in the winter air, like wine—Kate with her dancing scarlet feather,Bess with her peacock plumage fine
Read the excerpt from "Out in the Snow” by Louise Chandler Moulton.The snow and the silence came down together,Through the night so white and so still;And young folks housed from the bitter weather,Housed from the storm and the chill Heard in their dreams the sleigh-bells jingle,Coasted the hill-sides under the moon,Felt their cheeks with the keen air tingleSkimmed the ice with their steel-clad shoon.
Read the excerpt from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol [Jail]” by Oscar Wilde.That night the empty corridorsWere full of forms of Fear,And up and down the iron townStole feet we could not hear,And through the bars that hide the stars White faces seemed to peer.
Read the excerpt from "John Burns of Gettysburg” by Bret Harte.The milk that fell like a babbling floodInto the milk-pail red as blood!Or how he fancied the hum of beesWere bullets buzzing among the trees. But all such fanciful thoughts as theseWere strange to a practical man like Burns
Read the excerpt from "Ring Out, Wild Bells” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.Ring out old shapes of foul disease;Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;Ring out the thousand wars of old,Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Read the excerpt from Making a Fist by Naomi Shihab Nye.For the first time, on the road to Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
Read the excerpt from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol [Jail]” by Oscar Wilde.I never saw a man who lookedWith such a wistful eyeUpon that little tent of blueWhich prisoners call the sky,And at every drifting cloud that wentWith sails of silver by.
Read the excerpt from Making a Fist by Naomi Shihab Nye.For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
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