THOUGHTS FOR THE COMMONPLACE-BOOK.--No, Jessie and Mary, I have not
forgotten my promise to give you pretty poems and quaint passages now
and then for you to copy in your commonplace-book. I have had so many
questions to answer that my column has not been long enough for choice
extracts, but here to-day are three, which you may take pains to write
out in a fair hand, as the old writing-masters used to say. The first
quotation I make for you to-day is from Friedrich Ruckert, a great
German lyric poet, who was born at Schweinfurt, Bavaria, in 1788, and
died at Coburg in 1866. The little poem contains a thought for every
member of the C. Y. P. R. U.--a thought worth taking for a life motto: