On the WTM boards today there was a question posted about what some of us have had our children memorize. I got to look back at two of my favorites from this year and wanted to share them here.

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This song was made famous by Oliver Wendell Holmes and is often attributed to him. It is actually a Romanian folk song from The Bard of Dimbovitza according to a wonderful old book I own titled "The School Speaker and Reader" by William Dewitt-Hyde ©1900.

I Am Content
A spindle of hazel-wood had I;
Into the mill-stream it fell one day -
The water has brought it me back no more.

As he lay a-dying, the soldier spake:
                                                   "I am content.
Let my mother be told in the village there,
And my bride in the hut be told,
That they must pray with folded hands,
With folded hands for me."
The soldier is dead - and with folded hands
His bride and his mother pray.
On the field of battle they dug his grave,
And red with his life-blood the earth was dyed,
The earth they laid him in.
The sun looked down on him there and spake:
And flowers bloomed thickly upon his grave,
And were glad they blossomed there.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked the deep, dark grave:
"Did the banner flutter then?"
"Not so, my hero." the wind replied,
"The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave
                                                  "I am content."

And again he heard the shepherds pass
And the flocks go wandering by,
And the soldier asked: "Is the sound I hear
The sound of the battle's roar?"
And they all replied: "My hero, Nay!
Thou art dead and the fight is o'er,
Our country joyful and free."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave:
                                                 "I am content."

Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
And the soldier asks once more:
"Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love and remember me?"
"Not so, my hero," the lovers say,
"We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave:
                                                  "I am content."
A spindle of hazel-wood had I;
Into the mill-stream it fell one day -
The water has brought it me back no more.

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After watching the movie "Glory", the boys and I read an historical account of the assault on Fort Wagner and memorized a portion of the oration given by William James at the unveiling of the Shaw Memorial in 1897.

One piece of trivia learned is that Matthew Broderick, who starred in the movie  Glory, is a distant relation to Shaw. I think the resemblance is remarkable.
  

I've linked the complete speech above, here is the portion we memorized:

"The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their picturesqueness. For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had had no food since early morning. As they lay there in the evening twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge, neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of contemplation. Many and different must have been the thoughts that came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.

How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war, engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this regiment of black men and its maiden battle, - a battle, moreover, which was lost, - should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?

The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its material magnitude, nor by its immediate success. Thermopylae was a defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans stood for the whole worth of Grecian life. Bunker Hill was a defeat; but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to show as well as any victory that our fore-fathers were men of a temper not to be finally overcome. And so here. The war for our Union, with all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eye of history. And nowhere was that meaning better symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern negro regiment.

Look at the monument and read the story; - see the mingling of elements which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye. There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can almost hear them breathing as they march. State after State by its laws had denied them to be human persons. The Southern leaders in congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar kind of property." There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback, among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled. Onward they move together, a single resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so different frames. The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays the very soul and secret of those awful years."