A Gathering of Hope, by Helen Hayes

Like the few aforementioned books above, this is another I found hiding in a box in a closet in my garage. I'm not a fan of inspirational books. Sure, I've had my share of dark moods. But words of inspiration have always struck me as sappy. After flipping through this little book, however, and discovering poems and sayings by writers Robert Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Emerson, St. Augustine, Byron, Whitman, and Keats, as well as the Psalms, I couldn't resist reading it.

Hayes suffered the loss of both her daughter and later her husband. She knows grief and includes the writings of classic poets and poems that helped her through these spells of despondency. Not a bad collection. My favorite quote is probably Stevenson: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” My favorite excerpt is Hecuba's lines from “The Trojan Women” by Euripides, which is too long to include here. It's very moving. Three out of five stars. G