POEMS

——BY——

HENRY REED CONANT.

1893. The Sun Publishing Co., Kaukauna, Wis.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1893 By Henry Reed Conant, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

To My Brother, Carlos Everett Conant, A. B., Now Professor of Languages in the Chaddock College, Ill., and formerly Professor in the State University, of Minnesota, This Book of Poems is Affectionately Inscribed.

CONTENTS.

11

INTRODUCTION.

Henry Reed Conant was born in Janesville, Wis., on the seventeenth day of February, 1872. When four years of age he removed to Vermont, the native state of his parents Henry Clay and Dora Evaline (Reed) Conant. Henry was educated in the public schools and at the Morrisville “People’s Academy,” Vermont, and in his fifteenth year returned to the west.

He inherited from his New England ancestors a deep love of nature, and pronounced religious and moral strength, which tinge the whole body of his rhymes and poems. Like many poets in their juvenile days Mr. Conant’s first lines were simple and artless, and the world of critics can hardly assail him12 for penning his first rhymes in honor of his “first love,” thus:

His first published poem appeared in a little story paper, February, 1890, at Belvidere, Ills. Nearly all of Mr. Conant’s poems were written in Wisconsin, his native state. The selected poems forming this volume reflect the young poet’s individuality to a sensible degree. The trend of his thoughts and genius is toward the more solemn and religious aspects of nature, and of human experience. He dwells in the forest’s shade, on the banks of rivers flowing through lea and woodland, by the grave of a little child, and wanders back to his old New England home—to the scenes of his childhood.

Henry Reed Conant, like many other beginners in the literary arena, commits his poems to a critical public with the full consciousness of their poetical deficiencies. Criticism he must13 await, and gladly accept as the basis of that future development through which every poet must pass ere he attain that popular following that is the reward not only of genius, but of bitter disappointments.

A. K. G.

Appleton, Wis., Nov. 22, 1893.

17

LIFE.

18

DREAM OF A FAIRY.

19

20

TOGETHER.

21

BE NOT DISCOURAGED.

22

FOREST DELIGHTS.

23

PARTING.

24

SONG.

25