Verses

At Westminster Abbey, a baby’s marble cradle has gathered dust for three centuries—yet a stranger’s hand still reaches to touch it, and grief rises fresh as ever.

In this nineteenth-century collection, American poet Susan Coolidge turns from the tenderness of friendship to the ache of loss, finding feeling in a carved tomb, a flower, a storm, and the passing of a day. One speaker, bereft of the beloved she once comforted, asks what she can give now—and finds a way to carry that love into sadder lives. Across these verses, faith and sorrow meet in a voice that is intimate, clear-eyed, and gently hopeful. When love can no longer be given as before, what shape might it take?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.