Every Soul Hath Its Song Author:Fannie Hurst General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1916 Original Publisher: Harper and Brothers Subjects: Short stories, American Fiction / General Fiction / Anthologies Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustratio... more »ns and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: IN MEMORIAM '"TOWARD the city Mother Earth turns a plate- -- glass eye and an asphalt bosom. The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets. That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands. The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny. Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway. The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care. Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze. Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity. Greeks, first of men, perched their gods up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities. Because the city is as insidious as the sleepingdraught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds. What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of grass sucked in from the tender e...« less