Excerpt from Armageddon A_ poem without a publisher is like a boat without the water. Each may have graceful lines, and be paint ed in pleasing colors, but they refuse to carry their build er to the haven where he would be; and the sea of liter ature is much like the briny deep, for on both are calms and storms, reefs and bars, and many books as well as boats find their haven at the first ebbing tide. All of my literary boats are on land, except a few, and they are fast in the mud; those few were launched about a year ago, but they had unskillful pilots, tattered sails, and before they left the little bay by which I dwell the wind died out, so they drifted on the quicksands of that estuary called oblivion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.