Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

300 traditional songs, inc sheet music with full piano accompaniment & lyrics.

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244
OUR FAMILIAR SONGS
Go, forget me, why should sorrow, O'er that brow a shadow fling;
Go, forget me, and to-morrow Brightly smile and sweetly sing.
Smile, though I shall not be near thee;
Sing, though I should never hear thee; May thy soul with pleasure shine, Lasting as the gloom of mine.
Like the sun, thy presence glowing, Clothes the meanest thing in light;
And when thou, like him, art going, Loveliest objects fade in night.
All things looked so bright about thee That they nothing seem without thee: By that pure and lucid mind, Earthly things were too refined.
Go, thou vision wildly gleaming, Softly on my soul that fell;
Go, for me no longer beaming,— Hope and beauty, fare ye well!
Go, and all that once delighted,
Take, and leave me all benighted; — Glory's burning, generous swell, Fancy and the poet's shell.
THE FOUR-LEAVED SHAMROCK.
This song is one of a series upon the "Superstitions of Ireland," written by Samuel Lover, who also made the music. The four-leaved shamrock, so rarely found, is supposed to endue the finder with magic power. Moore somewhere says, it is traditionally related that St. Patrick made use of the species of trefoil called the shamrock, in explaining the doctrine of the Trinity-to the Pagan Irish, and thus it was adopted as the national emblem: and Miss Beaufort, in the " Transactions of the Royal Academy," remarks that " it is a curious- coincidence the trefoil plant (shamroc and shamrakh, in Arabic) having been held sacred in Iran, and considered emblematical of the Persian Triad."