Project Gutenberg Book of English Verse | Page 4

and seems to grow wilder with the years. With the anthologist--as with the fisherman who knows the fish at the end of his sea-line--the gift, if he have it, comes by sense, improved by practice. The definition, if he be clever enough to frame one, comes by after-thought. I don't know that it helps, and am sure that it may easily mislead.
Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be dissuaded by common objections against anthologies--that they repeat one another until the proverb [Greek] loses all?application--or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he had much enthusiasm but little reading.
A deeper import?Lurks in the legend told my infant years?Than lies upon that truth we live to learn.
Few of my contemporaries can erase--or would wish to erase--the dye their minds took from the late Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury: and he who has returned to it again and again with an affection born of companionship on many journeys must remember not only what the Golden Treasury includes, but the moment when this or that poem appealed to him, and even how it lies on the page. To Mr. Bullen's Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books and his other treasuries I own a more advised debt. Nor am I free of obligation to anthologies even more recent--to Archbishop Trench's Household Book of Poetry, Mr. Locker-Lampson's Lyra Elegantiarum, Mr. Miles' Poets and Poetry of the Century, Mr. Beeching's Paradise of English Poetry, Mr. Henley's English Lyrics, Mrs. Sharp's Lyra Celtica, Mr. Yeats' Book of Irish Verse, and Mr. Churton Collins' Treasury of Minor British Poetry: though my rule has been to consult these after making my own choice. Yet I can claim that the help derived from them--though gratefully owned--bears but a trifling proportion to the labour, special and desultory, which has gone to the making of my book.
For the anthologist's is not quite the dilettante business for which it is too often and ignorantly derided. I say this, and immediately repent; since my wish is that the reader should in his own pleasure quite forget the editor's labour, which too has been pleasant: that, standing aside, I may believe this book has made the Muses' access easier when, in the right hour, they come to him to uplift or to console--?[Greek]
My thanks are here tendered to those who have helped me with permission to include recent poems: to Mr. A. C. Benson, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. John Davidson, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. W. E. Henley, Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Mr. W. D. Howells, Dr. Douglas Hyde, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, Mr. George Meredith, Mrs. Meynell, Mr. T. Sturge Moore, Mr. Henry Newbolt, Mr. Gilbert Parker, Mr. T. W. Rolleston, Mr. George Russell ('A. E.'), Mrs. Clement Shorter (Dora Sigerson), Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Francis Thompson, Dr. Todhunter, Mr. William Watson, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mrs. Woods, and Mr. W. B. Yeats; to the Earl of Crewe for a poem by the late Lord Houghton; to Lady Ferguson, Mrs. Allingham, Mrs. A. H. Clough, Mrs. Locker-Lampson, Mrs. Coventry Patmore; to the Lady Betty Balfour and the Lady Victoria Buxton for poems by the late Earl of Lytton and the Hon. Roden Noel; to the executors of Messrs. Frederic Tennyson (Captain Tennyson and Mr. W. C. A. Ker), Charles Tennyson Turner (Sir Franklin Lushington), Edward?FitzGerald (Mr. Aldis Wright), William Bell Scott (Mrs. Sydney Morse and Miss Boyd of Penkill Castle, who has added to her kindness by allowing me to include an unpublished 'Sonet' by her sixteenth-century ancestor, Mark Alexander Boyd), William Philpot (Mr. Hamlet S. Philpot), William Morris (Mr. S. C. Cockerell), William Barnes, and R. L. Stevenson; to the Rev. H. C. Beeching for two poems from his own works, and leave to use his redaction of Quia Amore Langueo; to Mssrs. Macmillan for confirming?permission for the extracts from FitzGerald, Christina Rossetti, and T. E. Brown, and particularly for allowing me to insert the latest emendations in Lord Tennyson's non-copyright poems; to the proprietors of Mr. and Mrs. Browning's copyrights and to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for a similar favour, also for a copyright poem by Mrs. Browning; to Mr. George Allen for extracts from Ruskin and the author of Ionica; to Messrs. G. Bell & Sons for poems by Thomas Ashe; to Messrs. Chatto &