copyright 1888; W.B. Conkey Company publishers, Chicago; smaller hardbound; quite good condition for age (see pics) with unmarked pages, almost no age foxing of pages, and tight binding.
 
Author -
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (November 5, 1850 – October 30, 1919) was an American author and poet. Her works include Poems of Passion and Solitude, which contains the lines "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone". Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.
 
A popular poet rather than a literary poet, in her poems she expresses sentiments of cheer and optimism in plainly written, rhyming verse. Her world view is expressed in the title of her poem "Whatever Is—Is Best", suggesting an echo of Alexander Pope's "Whatever is, is right," a concept formally articulated by Gottfried Leibniz and parodied by Voltaire's character Doctor Pangloss in Candide.
 
None of Wilcox's works were included by F. O. Matthiessen in The Oxford Book of American Verse, but Hazel Felleman chose fourteen of her poems for Best Loved Poems of the American People, while Martin Gardner selected "The Way Of The World" and "The Winds of Fate" for Best Remembered Poems.