Lyra Heroica

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Title: Lyra Heroica
A Book of Verse for Boys
Author: Various
Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19316]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYRA
HEROICA ***
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LYRA HEROICA
A BOOK OF VERSE FOR BOYS
SELECTED AND
ARRANGED BY
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world
proclaim
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without
a name.
_Sir Walter Scott._

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
0. The selections from Walt Whitman are published by permission of
Mr. Whitman; and those from Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and
Bret Harte, through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, &
Co., the publishers of their works.
TO WALTER BLAIKIE
ARTIST-PRINTER
MY PART IN THIS BOOK
W. E. H.
Edinburgh, July 1891.
PREFACE
This book of verse for boys is, I believe, the first of its kind in English.
Plainly, it were labour lost to go gleaning where so many experts have
gone harvesting; and for what is rarest and best in English Poetry the
world must turn, as
heretofore, to the several 'Golden Treasuries' of
Professor Palgrave and Mr. Coventry Patmore, and to the excellent
'Poets' Walk' of Mr. Mowbray Morris. My purpose has been to choose
and sheave a certain number of those achievements in verse which, as
expressing the simpler sentiments and the more elemental emotions,
might fitly be addressed to such boys--and men, for that matter--as are
privileged to use our noble English tongue.
To set forth, as only art can, the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty
and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the
nobility of devotion--to a cause, an ideal, a passion even--the dignity of
resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is my ambition here.
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own,
and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of
all the world besides. That is, the personal equation is ever to be

reckoned withal, and I have had my preferences, as those that went
before me had theirs. I have omitted much, as Aytoun's 'Lays,' whose
absence many will resent; I have included much, as that brilliant piece
of doggerel of Frederick Marryat's, whose presence some will regard
with distress. This without reference to enforcements due to the very
nature of my work.
I have adopted the birth-day order: for that is the simplest. And I have
begun with--not Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor the ballads,
but--Shakespeare and Agincourt; for it seemed to me that a
book of
heroism could have no better starting-point than that heroic pair of
names. As for the ballads, I have placed them, after much considering,
in the gap between old and new, between classic and romantic, in
English verse. The witness of Sidney and Drayton's example
notwithstanding, it is not until 1765, when Percy publishes the
'Reliques,' that the ballad spirit begins to be the master influence that
Wordsworth confessed it was; while as for the history of the matter,
there are who hold that 'Sir Patrick Spens,' for example, is the work of
Lady Wardlaw, which to others, myself among them, is a thing
preposterous and distraught.
It remains to add that, addressing myself to boys, I have not scrupled to
edit my authors where editing seemed desirable, and that I have broken
up some of the longer pieces for convenience in reading. Also, the help
I have received while this book of 'Noble Numbers' was in course of
growth--help in the way of counsel, suggestion, remonstrance,
permission to use--has been such that it taxes gratitude and makes
complete acknowledgment impossible.
W. E. H.
CONTENTS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) and
MICHAEL
DRAYTON (1563-1631).

PAGE

I. AGINCOURT
Introit