Excerpt from Daniel Decatur Emmet If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation - andrew fletcher. NO names are deathless save those of the world's singers. Frances E. Willard. If this ascription of power and immortality seems somewhat sweeping and a little too poetically generous, the fact remains that music, affecting as it does the emotional in man and touch ing all its keys, exerts a distinct influence on individual and national destiny; and the simple songs that find their way to the universal heart shall survive long after the singer has departed and his very name, to the millions who have felt the spell of his genius, has ceased to be even a memory. The popular melody is one of the avenues through which the human soul finds ex pression. If it has its charm to soothe the savage breast, it has likewise its stimulus to action. With paeans on their lips men have crowded the road to death as to a festival. In our annals the song writers deserve a place. From lullaby to bat tle hymn they help to mould character and build the state. 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.