3. Memorize at least one stanza of the poem.

O BEAUTIFUL! MY COUNTRY!

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

This is a part of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" written in honor of the heroes of Harvard College, killed in the Civil War. Lowell here imagines America as a beautiful woman—a Goddess of Liberty—now fully restored to her worshipers.

O beautiful! My Country! ours once more! Smoothing thy gold of war-disheveled hair O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, . . . What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? 5 We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else, and we will dare!

THE PROBLEMS OF THE REPUBLIC

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The following is extracted from the inaugural address of President Roosevelt, delivered March 4, 1905. It is of special interest to read it in connection with Mr. Hughes's speech (page 356) and to compare the ideas of citizenship and of our country as expressed in the two. In reading this speech you should bear in mind that the era was one of peace, long undisturbed by war. Our problems then were the ordinary problems of everyday living.

Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of 5 administering the affairs of a continent under the form of a democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, also have brought the care and anxiety 10 inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers.

Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government 15 throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, 20 neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us, nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

Yet after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our 5 fathers who founded and preserved this republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits 10 of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the free men who compose it.

But we have faith that we shall not prove false to memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work; 15 they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children's children.

To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical 20 intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, of endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this republic in the days of Washington; which made great the men who preserved this republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln. 25

1. Give a full report of Roosevelt's life and activities—political, literary, personal. Try to describe the kind of man you think he was.

2. Find in this section of your Reader expressions similar to lines 10-13, page 355.