"Some ships go East and others West, / While the selfsame breezes blow; / It's the set of the sails and not the gales / That bids them where to go. / Like the winds of the seas / Are the ways of the Fates, / As we journey on through life; / It's the set of the soul / That determines the goal, / And not the storms and strife."  From Salem's 1929 yearbook.

In the late 1800s, children were taught early that people look like dogs.  From Pittypat and Tippytoe by Eugene Field, 1896.

That is a cat respectable,

Connectable

With selectable

Felines respectable,

Whose names would make you quiver.

That is a cat of piety,

Not satiety,

But sobriety.

Its very purr is of piety

And thanks to its Feline Giver.

—Sinclair Lewis

Photo from Northeastern's 1972 yearbook.

"The pleasant books, that silently among our household treasures take familiar places, and are to us as if a living tongue spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces."

From East Carolina's 1930 yearbook.

"My Life Like a Feather Pillow."  From Tenderloin Times, April-May 1981.

We encountered a charming wizard's song in "What If a Witch?" by Elaine McQueen (Ethos, 1964). 

I came from there

and now I'm here

and tomorrow I'll be

I don't know where ...

I'm a flunk at ghosts

I can't make toasts

and instead of boiling

my cauldron roasts ...

My name is ___,

a wizard by whim.

I spin magic marvels

when daytime grows dim ...

But you're all so friendly

I'll try to be good

and put all my magic

away in the wood.

"'And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill' — / Freighted with joys of banished years / The port of fond memory to fill."  From Salem's 1929 yearbook.

In the second line, we find "corse," the original spelling of "corpse."  The p, eventually added in honor of the Latin corpus, was initally silent.

From Peter Homunculus by Gilbert Cannan, 1909.

"What has he done?  I cannot say.  We'll find out to-morrow, and beat him today."  A century later, this isn't a nonsense rhyme but the way our "justice" system works.  From Nursery Rhymes, illustrated by Claud Lovat Fraser, 1922.

From St. Nicholas magazine, December 1917.

Reblog if the Roman numeral at the top of the poem doubles as the answer to the rhetorical question.  From the Elson Primary School Reader, Book One, 1913.

This is what we think when critics attempt to mar our workmanship.  "Could it be dissemination of some wicked defamation of our blameless reputation by some imp of hell's creation?"  From the Ole Miss yearbook of 1898.

Reblog if "oh heck" is your boyfriend.  From Queens College's 1955 yearbook.

"And when they coffined him, / They laid the lizard on his heart."  From Pearson's, 1902.

"And yet I lift my sightless face / Toward the eerie light, / And tread the lonely way we trace / Across the haunted night."  From The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell, 1905.

"If here at the end of ages this is all—a white face floating in the whirling ball."  From "A Leaf from the Devil's Jest-Book" by Edwin Markham, in The Man with the Hoe, 1899.

Insomnia turns us into ghosts.  From Poems by B. D., 1880.

Typographical violets displace rivulets, and there's shining for shimmering.  A correction from Improvement Era, 1906.

From the dark depths of the human soul.  From Jugend, 1896.