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"Stops of Various Quills" by William Dean Howells.

With 43 poems and lavish illustrations by Howard Pyle adorning each page, Stops of Various Quills has been described as "a labor of love"—where the "great kinship" that existed between author and illustrator is evident in both text and picture. Written in 1895, it contributed to Howells being considered a "major force in the shaping of American literature."

WEFT of leafless spray

Woven fine against the gray

Of the autumnal day,

And blurred along those ghostly garden tops

Clusters of berries crimson as the drops

That my heart bleeds when I remember

How often, in how many a far November,

Of childhood and my children's childhood I was glad,

With the wild rapture of the Fall,

Of all the beauty, and of all

The ruin, now so intolerably sad.
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Featured July 2011