A Treasury of the Familiar Book by Ralph L Woods C1943

Reference id: 7Q4DC6LfH6I 587

Book "A Treasury of the Familiar" by Ralph L. Woods, copyright 1943.

At last here is a book which will delight the average American - not merely the average bookish American.

It is that rare kind of book because it has in it only those poems, prose passages, songs, quotations, ditties, speeches, limericks, historical documents, dramatic scenes, letters, episodes and incidents that are familiar to all Americans. Many of the selections would be difficult to locate; never before have all been assembled in one big book.

Let the average person casually pick up this book, and immediately he will be chuckling reminiscently over some item such as Finnigin to Flannigan (or Down in the Lehigh Valley), glowing over Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (or Poes To Helen), stirring to Mark Antonys Oration over Julius Caesars body (or Churchills Blood, Sweat and Tears), exasperated by the Lady or the Tiger, the while he encounters familiar passages from Shakespeare, the Bible, Mark Twain, Edgar Guest, and such brief items as the Hippocratic Oath or the famous Nantucket limerick and its sequels.

Inevitably, many selections will take readers back to a certain day or year of happy memory. This is the kind of book people like to have, and to reread as well as read. Its the kind of book an unbending high brow might look down the end of his nose at, for its certainly not literature - but hed read it on the sly at the first opportunity.

In it - by the hundreds - are those poems, prose passages, songs, speeches, quotations, dramatic scenes, episodes and incidents which have won their way into the hearts and minds of all Americans; old familiar writings, which in these days of war and destruction become all the more precious, and newer ones which we ever will cherish. Open it at any place - you will read every section at one time or another - but here is a sampling of what is in store:

Abide with Me, Henry F Lyte

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

After Dunkirk, Winston Churchill

Against Censorship, John Milton

Appointment in Samarra, Somerset Maugham

A thing of Beauty is a joy forever, John Keats

The Balcony Scene, William Shakespeare

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

Breathes there the man with soul so dead, sir walter scott

The Caisson song, edmund l gruber

Casey at the bat, Ernest Lawrence Thayer

The Childrens Hour, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

etc