you a nosegay from the fields of English Poetry, including some of its humbler as well as rarer growths; I hope you may find it, as I have done, a 'handful of pleasant delights'; but it will not, and ought not to satisfy you. You must go out and gather for yourselves. You will not, perhaps, find anything more beautiful than some of the things I have included; but you will find much that is as beautiful, or nearly so. You may set Comus against Lycidas, and Hellas against Adonais; you may match almost any of the sonnetgroups, and make your own selection from the exquisite left-out things of Spenser and Wordsworth. And of living writers (for those privileged anthologies that need take no account of copyrights, or critics, or limited space) you may multiply again and again the examples I have given. "You will not easily exhaust the 'infinite variety' of these fields, and will soon be bewildered, and possibly disheartened. But go on bravely, and, above all things, be honest. Choose what you really like, and you will learn what you ought to like. Wordsworth's wonderful lines about the Poet are still true : "And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love.' "And so, to drop metaphor, I trust that you may be tempted by what you read here to read more widely and more deeply, and that you may find in your search for beauty that purest of pleasures which experience has shown to be proof against sickness and old age, and which, if we are to believe Spenser and Plato, even death itself will be unable to destroy." With these wishes for those who read it, I commend my little book to its fate. For the use of copyright poems, I have to express my warm acknowledgments to the following authors and publishers-Miss Rossetti, Miss Ingelow, Mr. Brown (author of Fo'c's'le Yarns), Mr. Lewis Morris, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. A. Lang, Mr. Allingham, Mr. E. Bowen, Messrs. Smith and Elder (for the use of two copyright sonnets by Mrs. Browning), Messrs. Kegan Paul, Messrs. Longman, and Messrs. Macmillan. I have also to express my obligations to those American authors whose poems I have inserted, and to thank Canon Ainger for permission to make use of his notes to poems by Coleridge and Lamb. CLIFTON, November 1888. |