The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sylvan Cabin, by Edward Smyth Jones

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Title: The Sylvan Cabin
A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse

Author: Edward Smyth Jones

Contributor: William Stanley Braithwaite

Release Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #26036]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE SYLVAN CABIN

[Illustration]

EDWARD SMYTH JONES

THE SYLVAN CABIN

A CENTENARY ODE ON
THE BIRTH OF LINCOLN

AND OTHER VERSE

BY
EDWARD SMYTH JONES

WITH INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE

[Illustration]

BOSTON
SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY

1911

Copyright, 1911

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY

TO

THE HON. ARTHUR P. STONE

Justice of the Third District Court

Cambridge, Massachusetts

[Illustration: (signature)]

Edward Smyth Jones
Boston, Mass.

INTRODUCTION

A poet that comes through a unique experience, as so many poets have,
and very recently as the author of this volume has, arrives through
his personality rather than his work at a precipitate sort of fame
that may serve his talents well or serve them ill. To know that a man
was sent to jail as the consequence of a passionate desire to go to
college, and that that desire involved the tramping of dusty and
hungry miles, adds to the interest to the man that cannot fail in some
significant way to set a glamor upon the poet. Poetry is made out of
experience--the experience of dreams, of action, of desires and hopes
baffled on the inexplicable sea of circumstance; in these latter the
dream is as the spirit, and the man whose art becomes an expression of
all he has realized in living, his experiences become something more
than art, they are the subtle rendering reality that is truth.

In these poems of Mr. Jones' it is that which gives them a unique
value because they are in a deeply essential manner the rendering of a
huma